This week wraps up my winter teaching engagement in Chicago, in anticipation of our seasonal return to France. It will give a chance for first-hand exposure to the charged atmosphere in Paris, after the terrorists’ attack of January 7 on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, on which I have earlier set out some observations.
On February 26 just past, a full-house audience at the University of Chicago heard Zineb El Rhazoui, the Moroccan-born French journalist for Charlie Hebdo, who happened to be away from its office the day of the deadly attack.
She spoke under heavy if prudent security measures – under the title “Who Is Charlie Hebdo?” – and under two broad themes: “Should freedom of speech include a protected right to blaspheme?” and “If so, how in a civilized society should that right be exercised?”
Not surprisingly, El Rhazoui came down squarely on the first. Threats to her own safety and the eleven murders at her office give her a direct personal stake in Voltaire's principle, as she predictably invoked it, that “while I may disagree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Few of us would be so brave as that – which reflects on the legitimate scope of the popularly embraced slogan, “Je suis Charlie.”
As for the second, the challenging part of the evening was El Rhazoui’s sketch of the limits on free speech under French law – impositions that would be unacceptable under the broader principles of the American Constitution’s First Amendment – forbidding expressions of personal “racisme” or advocacy of Holocaust denial.
First, Voltaire himself did not trim his views so fine.
Second, that a journalist for a satirical cartoon periodical should find these restrictions tolerable would be a stretch beyond the core American proposition: that subject to the narrowest possible limitations, all speech is to be protected, however repugnant or hateful or ad hominem, for the precious sake of liberty of thought and expression, and freedom from censorship from any source, public or private.
Although, in response to an audience question, El Rhazoui did display a consistency that eludes the restrictive French legal system, by endorsing the free-speech rights of the fiercely anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné – a regular target of French law enforcement including his January arrest, right after the attacks at Charlie Hebdo, for alleged violations of the country’s laws on hate speech.
Lurking in the background of this theoretical underbrush, it is not easy for an American to find a clear analytic path through the tangled rhetorical thicket grown up around the complicated French concept of laïcité.
Easy and perhaps democratically admirable at its most general, that principle justifies the French national refusal even to gather data on the racial and religious demographics of its population. But it has its darker reverse side, in the deep, pervasive and persistent impact of scarcely-concealed structural bigotry and discrimination based on personal qualities such as name, skin color and country of origin.
The French political scene continues to present a clouded picture to an outside observer -- from the “dog whistle” signals by which the far-right National Front’s Marine LePen has re-cast if not disavowed her father’s cruder language, to the embedded inability of President François Hollande and his economic minister Emmanuel Macron to sustain a workable majority in the National Assembly in favor of even a marginal set of anodyne “reforms” to the country’s sclerotic economy.
To arrive in France in the welcoming beginning of its spring, then, with both flowers and curiosity in full bloom, will be to travel in search for the warming clarity of sunlight.
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