Standing Up for the Pen vs. the Sword in France

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/world/europe/standing-up-for-the-pen-vs-the-sword-in-france.html

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PARIS — In a show of unity that surprised even themselves, more than 100,000 French citizens took to the streets of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse and other cities Wednesday night, just hours after the slaughter in the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

That first spontaneous outpouring of solidarity was not just about the crime but also its target — the right to free speech, a value held particularly dear in France, birthplace of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Ordinary citizens, commentators and politicians condemned what they said was an attack against France’s values, its democracy and its republic. Some experts suggested that Charlie Hebdo, known for its provocative brand of no-holds-barred satire, came under fire because it was peculiarly French.

The nationwide mobilization in the defense of liberty won admiration from abroad and at home.

In an editorial on Friday, the newspaper Libération noted that those initial demonstrations “warmed our hearts,” particularly since they were accompanied by calls not to confuse France’s Muslims — two of the victims were of North African origin — with the Islamist terrorists.

But freedom of expression, in France as elsewhere, is never a simple issue. Restraints are often put on words that cause offense, sometimes by law, sometimes by unwritten code. But in the face of threats of violence and death, any expression, even the most insulting, is nonnegotiable.

In the United States, where the protection of free speech is treasured, many news outlets chose not to republish the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that put Charlie Hebdo on Al Qaeda’s hit list. The New York Times cited concerns about offending “religious sensibilities,” while The Associated Press said it refrains from transmitting “deliberately provocative images.”

In France, where blasphemy hasn’t been illegal since the French Revolution but a ban on hate speech has been on the books since 1881, the country’s top court last year upheld a government-issued restraining order that banned a show by a stand-up comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, because of its anti-Semitic content.

Dieudonné, as he is known, has been repeatedly fined for his crude slurs against Jews and mockery of the Holocaust. In 2008, another French court quashed a suit challenging Charlie Hebdo’s right to reprint Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad with bombs in his turban. “In a secular and pluralistic society, the respect of all faiths goes hand in hand with the liberty to criticize all religions,” the court said.

Since then, despite multiple threats and a firebombing, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists continued to exercise that freedom, mocking not only Muhammad, but also the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. As Jean Cabut, a 76-year-old cartoonist who was among those killed, told an interviewer several years ago, “we’ve been attacking bishops since we were little.”

Unlike Dieudonné, who has reviled an ethnic group, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists typically targeted those who invoke Muhammad in a campaign of hate and murder. In a drawing printed alongside the Danish cartoons in 2005, Mr. Cabut — known as Cabu — showed a picture of tearful Muhammad being overwhelmed by fundamentalists. “It is hard to be loved by idiots,” the caption read.

The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut put it another way. “Here are these caricatures that say that Muslims are violent and to show they are not true, there are Muslims who say we will kill you,” he said in a 2008 interview.

The threats only stiffened Charlie Hebdo’s resolve. That courage cost its cartoonists their lives, but it also made their point, the same one that rallied more than 3.7 million across the country on Sunday.

Like free speech, secularism is a cherished French principle — one that is not easily understood by some Muslims who still find any mockery of the prophet deeply offensive. Some have argued that the condemnation of Dieudonné reflects a double standard, but the difference is that he was stopped by a court order, while the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are dead.