Charlie Hebdo Needs to Know Why Speech in France Remains Unfree

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

20 January 15

n the days after terrorists killed the cartoonists and journalists at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, school teachers across France asked their students to observe a minute of silence in homage to the victims. Several Muslim students objected, especially in the poor suburbs of Paris. Charlie Hebdo attacked us and our religion, said the students. They had to be punished.

These incidents occurred in hundreds of schools. The media reported them widely, the National Assembly discussed them at length, and even generally reasonable people like Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem saw them as “disrespect for authority” and an affront to state-ordained “rites.” Vallaud-Belkacem herself comes from a Muslim family that immigrated to France from Morocco, and has been praised for wanting to talk with the children and their parents. But she was no less stern in her response. “Schools are on the front line,” she declared. “They will be firm in punishing the students.”

What a mind-boggling parallel! The Muslim students, their parents who taught them, and the French state are so caught up in their equally authoritarian mindsets that their knee-jerk response is to punish those who break the rules, whether those rules come from the Prophet Mohammad, those who speak in his name, or those who speak in the name of France’s “Republican values.” Obsessed with rules and punishment, they seem doomed to a dialog of the deaf.

The moment could be so promising. Never have French elites talked so openly of reaching out and including others. After years of French officials and intellectuals running away from what they saw as divisive communitarianism, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has declared that France would not be France without its Jews, and his government took only a week to realize that they needed to provide the same protection to Muslim mosques as they are now providing to Jewish schools and synagogues. The week’s delay was yet another insult to French Muslims, who are under increasing attacks.

But even Valls, an immigrant from Catalonia, proclaims his die-hard defense of “Republican values” as if he were hoisting an ideological flag or repeating a religious mantra. Somehow he cannot bring himself to explain in plain language that France guarantees its different communities the freedom to believe or not believe whatever they want, but demands that they not try to impose their beliefs on others. This past week an imam made precisely that argument on French television, telling his fellow Muslims that they would just have to learn to live with Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Why can’t French officials speak as clearly and to the point?

President Francois Hollande stumbles even worse when he defends the mish-mash he calls “free speech.” He promises to protect Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemy against all religions, which he should do even in the face of the horrific human cost. But what happens to Hollande’s “free speech” when France moves to censor the Internet? When it arrests the openly anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala and over 50 others for the thought crime of “apologizing for terrorism?” Or when it leaves in place a whole range of French laws banning “racial hatred” and any denial of the Holocaust?

Whatever the why’s and wherefore’s of the French legal system, which The New Yorker has well described, and however well-meaning such laws may have started out to be, any authoritarian stifling of the content of speech directly violates basic human freedom. This was the lesson students at Berkeley learned in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in 1964. It’s a lesson Charlie Hebdo embodies. It’s a lesson Pope Francis and President Obama need to understand when they preach limits on free expression. And it’s a lesson the French Republic needs to relearn from Voltaire – that we may detest what others say, but must defend to the death their right to say it.

France should be proud of that tradition, but until it puts it into practice, people all over the world will continue to think that the French have double standards. They do, and their supposedly well-meaning laws only build support for the likes of Dieudonné and his good friend Jean-Marie le Pen, the founder and honorary president of the anti-immigrant Front National, which his daughter Marine now heads.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.