Blasphemy,  France,  Freedom of Expression

Toujours Charlie? Douteux

By Madame Le Cerf

On 7th January 2015 two jihadis broke (forced their way,) into the Paris offices of the weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo, kicking off a few days of slaughter that stunned France. Cherif and SaÏd Kouachi, armed with AK7’s killed 11 people, 8 of them part of the Charlie Hebdo editorial ream, and wounded another 11. On their way out they shot dead a policeman whom they had wounded earlier and who was lying in the street. As they left the scene they shouted, “We have avenged the honour of the Prophet”.

The next day, one of their associates, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a municipal policewoman and seriously injured a council worker in Montrouge. On the 9th he took hostages in a small kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes and killed four of them. The other victims of January 2015 were members of the public or the police who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Kouachis and Coulibaly were killed in shoot outs with the security forces in the following few days. The Kouachis said they were acting on behalf of Al Qaeda and Coulibaly said he was acting on behalf of Islamic State.

Posters appeared all over France-a black background with the words “Je suis Charlie” emblazoned in white. On the 11th massive demonstrations took place all over France with the demonstrators declaring that they were Charlie. It has to be said that there was considerable hypocrisy at the Paris march which assembled more than 1.5 million people. 44 heads of government from all over the world took part and some of them were definitely not Charlie. Like Abbas of the PA who cheekily took up a place in the front row!
Charlie Hebdo had been attacked because they regularly published cartoons making fun of Islam and its prophet (among other religions and religious figures). They had been one of only 3 press outlets in France that dared to publish the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. They had successfully defended the legal actions brought against them in 2006 by various organisations including the Grand Mosqué of Paris for publishing them.

Every January since 2015 there have been commemorations, but many people are asking on this 10th anniversary (which has seen more widespread commemorations) “What’s changed?” and “Are things better or worse?”. The general consensus is that they are worse. That in terms of censorship against expressions of mockery or criticism of Islam, there has been a change of opinion. That today millions would not march to declare that they are Charlie.

An article published in the weekly “Marianne” reviewed the results of a survey conducted by IFOP (national statistics office) for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation in partnership with Charlie Hebdo. They found that those surveyed in the 18-25 age bracket were at odds with the rest of the population with regard to press freedom and cartoons because a majority were opposed to those ideas.
On the whole the results of the survey were reassuring because 76% of those surveyed thought that freedom of expression including caricature (understood in French as ridiculing or mocking people or ideas) was important. This was 18% more than a similar survey reported in 2012 showing that the attack on Charlie Hebdo had been a shocking wake-up call. Also, for 19% of those surveyed the attack had changed their attitude to press cartoons causing them to regard them as more important.
Also, more of those surveyed said that they were favourable to the law of 1881 on press freedom which expressly authorised criticism and mockery of religions. 62% now as against only 50% in 2020. 69% said that they liked cartoons and 65% said that they would miss them if they disappeared.

But these figures, reassuring as they seem, concern the population as a whole. The picture is different when one focuses on the 18-24 year olds. The majority of this age group thinks that you can’t laugh at anything and everything in France. 64% of this age group and 71% of the 24-34 year olds believe this compared to 52% of the over 65’s. Even worse, nearly half (44%) of the 18-24 year olds say they are against the right to caricature. According to Frédéric Dabi, Director-General of IFOP, who was interviewed on this subject by Marianne in 2020, the explanation for this attitude is growing religiosity in this age group. An age group in which, I think it is worth pointing out, there is a greater proportion of individuals from a Muslim background than in the general population. This attitude goes along with much less support for Charlie and its journalists. 56% of 18-24 year olds say they have read Charlie Hebdo but 31% of them think that it should not have published the Mohammed cartoons in 2006 because they risked provoking “tensions”. 46% of young French people found that Cabu’s cartoon on the front page of the 8th February 2006 edition, showing Mohammed in tears because it’s hard being loved by “cons” (idiots) particularly shocking. 35% thought it should not have been published, an 8% increase over those surveyed in 2021.

This phenomenon among young French people is not new or even particularly recent. Studies done just after the beheading of Samuel Paty in Conflans-Sainte Honorine in October 2020 revealed that the right to “blaspheme” was already contested by 52% of secondary school pupils and a third of them thought that a teacher should not use anti-religious cartoons to teach about free speech as Paty had done. Frédéric Dabi observed “Behind these statistics lies a refusal to see the distinction between the right to blaspheme and the tendency to discriminate or be racist against a community or a religion. Also, the idea that, if one shows drawings of the Prophet or cartoons, one cannot respect believers”.

 

 

This idea seems well rooted among young people with 76% declaring in 2020 that people must “respect religions in order not to offend believers”. Some teachers, interviewed by Marianne three days after the murder of Samuel Paty, saw this tendency as a real menace for the teaching of their subjects. One teacher in Seine-Saint Denis had chosen just to describe the cartoons rather than show them. He said that when he described Cabu’s famous front page, the class “exploded. “They immediately started insulting Charlie Hebdo and some of them said that it should be made illegal. When I tried to put forward opposing arguments, they tried to put words in my mouth to trap me. For many of them Charlie is the symbol of what they see as persecution of Muslims”.

The difference between generations is also seen politically. Half of those who vote for La France Insoumise are under 35. Less than two thirds of them uphold freedom of expression while the figure for the electorate as a whole is three quarters. Only 47% of those who support LFI believe in the right to blaspheme as compared with 62% of the French in general. They are the only part of the French electorate where support for the right to blaspheme is less than 50%. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, if the supporters of the National Rally (RN) are more favourable to the right to caricature, a large proportion of them (68%) also think that one cannot laugh at everything.
Of greater concern was the drop in the numbers for the population as a whole who said they were prepared to participate in showing overt support for Charlie by going on a march (47% in June 2024 as against 53% in 2020) or repeating a minute of silence in homage to the victims (71% in June 2024 as against 80% in 2020). The number who were prepared to disrupt such commemoration with insults or otherwise remained about the same (13% in June 2024 as against 14% in 2020).

The study done by IFOP concluded that «the relationship with religion is probably the determining sociological factor with regard to humour when it comes to subjects considered “delicate” but also with regard to support for freedom of expression and the right to blaspheme”. Those people who said they were believers were less likely to consider freedom of expression as a fundamental right (66% only as against 82% of atheists).
The study shows not only that opinions on the subject of freedom of expression differ as between the religious and others but also that specific religious affiliation is a differentiating factor. While a majority of the French think that it is permissible to caricature anything this is not the case among French Muslims with 55% of them disagreeing as against only 20% of the irreligious.

This ties in with why support for Charlie Hebdo is diminishing among the young. It is difficult to find up-to-date statistics on the percentage of Muslims in the French population. The general consensus is about 10% but, given ever increasing legal and illegal immigration, mainly from the Mahgreb and sub-Saharan Africa, this might be a conservative estimate. But the proportion among the young population is probably more than 10%. A 2023 survey put it at 12% a rise of 4% since 2018. Another survey, done in 2020, again by IFOP for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation in partnership with Charlie Hebdo on the attitudes of young Muslims produced troubling results. 75% of French Muslims under 25 admitted that they put their religion above the laws of the Republic compared with only 25% of those over 35. Even worse, 45% of the under 25’s thought that Islam was incompatible with the values of French society. 24% of those over 35 shared this opinion. Mosque attendance for 18-24 year-olds almost doubled in 8 years from 23% in 2011 to 40% in 2019. The problems in the schools (about which I will write in a future article) have resulted in an opinion among young people in general that religious faith should be respected so as to avoid hurting the feelings of believers. This is flatly contrary to tradition here in France, where, since the relaxation of press censorship and the separation of religion and the state enacted in the 1905 law on laïcité, there has been a strong current of mockery of religion. The Catholic Church had taken Charlie Hebdo to court many times before the Muslims jumped on the lawfare bandwagon.
But Catholic hardliners did not take up Kalashnikovs and slaughter cartoonists. They did not chop the heads off teachers in the street. Catholic pupils did not threaten their teachers with violence. “I’ll do a Samuel Paty on you” is something many French teachers dread hearing nowadays.

In an interview with Causeur for the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Phillipe Val, said “With political Islam, fear is omnipresent”. Since 2006, when under his editorship, Charlie published the Danish cartoons, Val has lived with 24/7 police protection- the same level of protection provided for the Israeli and US ambassadors! He believes that things have got worse in terms of censorship. The pressure for self-censorship now comes, not just from jihadis but also from what he calls “a certain intellectual stratum, in particular academics but also leading newspapers, such as Le Monde and all who follow its editorial line. Result-even though attacks continue, a large number of French politicians denounce what they call the stigmatisation of Muslims which might be going under the cloak of criticism of Islam.”.
But Val sees light at the end of the tunnel. There are some (though lamentably few) politicians from the old left who see the problem and can still claim to be Charlie- Manuel Valls, Bernard Cazeneuve and Bertrand Delanöe. The positions of Le Figaro and Le Parisien on the subjects of Islamism and separatism have become more hardline. He thinks that anti-woke discourse is starting to gain ground and says, “You’ll see wokism will become old hat.”. However, he is less sanguine about what can be done against the fear that radical Islam has spread and continues to spread in France. He gives the example of a French policeman of Mahgrebin origin. The man is an atheist as is his wife, but she still wears the hijab to avoid being harassed where they live. No question either of being seen with a sandwich in their hand during Ramadan. “We pretend” they say.

In an article about cartoons in schools in Le Parisien, Val points out the importance of keeping the schools as a free space for all- especially for children from Muslim families- so as to give them a chance to escape from religious oppression. But he is not at all sure that teachers are able to accomplish that these days. Many teachers are leaving the profession. They don’t want to be confronted by pupils who say that their prophet must not be insulted, that Darwin was wrong or that the Holocaust didn’t happen – or worse, that it did, and the Jews had it coming just like Charlie Hebdo. Above all they don’t want to end up like Samuel Paty or Dominique Bernard.

For the 10th anniversary of the massacre, Charlie Hebdo issued a double edition. They had set up an international competition for cartoonists to submit drawings about God and religion and received 350 from people in lots of different countries. 39 were published in this bumper edition. Only one of them shows Mohammed and that was only obliquely. It showed an artist having a finger wagged at him as he draws a picture of another artist drawing a picture of another artist drawing Mohammed and the caption read “…and if I draw a bloke who is drawing another bloke who is drawing a third bloke drawing Mohammed, is that O.K?”

 

 

Among the comments of people who read Charlie regularly was one by Charles Berling, an actor and theatre director. He said that over and above the threats of censorship against journalists there was a growing tendency towards self-censorship insinuating itself at all levels of society. He described having directed a film in Beirut more than 15 years ago and having been struck, as somebody who lived in a society where artists were able to express themselves freely, by the self-censorship that he found in Beirut. Each time that the directors and artists he encountered spoke to him about a project they were undertaking, they described how they were having to cut out this or that part of the original text so as not to rub up one of the various communities the wrong way. He said that he now understood how the philosophy of communitarianism carried within it the seeds of self-censorship, because it gradually destroyed the human project of universalism by pushing the notion that a person’s social identity and personality are primarily determined by community relationships with individual characteristics playing only a minor role.

“The pressure is so great that one gives up one’s liberty to speak out and to create in order not to upset people and to live safely. Today we are in that situation in France.”

Ayatollah Khomeini said “Allah did not create man so he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There is no humour in Islam. There are no jokes in Islam.”.

I’ll leave the last word to Riss from his editorial in the 10th anniversary edition.

“If you want to laugh that means that you want to live. Laughter, irony, caricature are manifestations of optimism. Whatever happens, good or bad, the desire to laugh will never disappear.”

Vive Charlie! L’chaim.