The New Yorker has a good article about this: http://goo.gl/Hh90a1. Here's a core paragraph.
The different treatment accorded to Charlie Hebdo and Dieudonné is, however, built into France’s complex cluster of laws regulating protected speech. These laws are alternately very free and highly restrictive. Right after the French Revolution, France abrogated its old laws making blasphemy a crime—and soCharlie Hebdo’s blasphemous depictions of Muhammad are not a crime. At the same time, France’s press laws, which date to the late nineteenth century, make it a crime to “provoke discrimination, hatred, or violence toward a person or group of persons because of their origin or belonging to a particular ethnicity, nation, race, or religion.” In other words, you can ridicule the prophet, but you cannot incite hatred toward his followers. To take two more examples, the actress Brigitte Bardot was convicted and fined for having written, in 2006, about France’s Muslims, “We are tired of being led around by the nose by this population that is destroying our country.” Meanwhile, the writer Michel Houellebecq (whose new novel was featured in the issue of Charlie Hebdo that came out just before the attack) was brought up on charges, but acquitted, for having said in an interview that Islam “is the stupidest religion.” Bardot was clearly directing hostility toward Muslim people, and was thus found guilty, while Houellebecq was criticizing their religion, which is blasphemous, but not a crime, in France.On Sun Jan 18 2015 at 7:34:19 AM Michel Bloch <[hidden email]> wrote:============================================================Having been for several years one of the few “French moles” on your forum, I feel obliged to write for the first time. Hi Nick!
1. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker being asked why he wears the peace-sign on his marine-corps uniform, answers “Sir, this shows the ambiguity of human nature”.
What you should know is that the key people from Charlie Hebdo were the best political cartoonists in France, a sort of “Pleiades of the Cartoonists”. They promoted anarchy and anticlericalisms and therefore were hated by most of the Establishment. To better express how incongruous the aftermath of their death was I enclose one of the many cartoons I received; it shows a fortune teller predicting to those guys what will happen after their death, and that’s how it goes: the bell of Notre-Dame-de-Paris will ring; the rightists will celebrate your fame, MRS Merkel will march in the street for you… All of this is so unbelievable that all they can do is laugh, laugh, and laugh!
What followed the slaughter in Paris, was a combination of bottom up and top down phenomena’s so was very open to irrationality. Those events demonstrated-if needed-how ambiguous the human nature is!
2. As regards the freedom of speech and how it is defended in each of our countries, here again, it is not that simple.
After Shoah, and to fight against a rampant anti-Semitism including the negation of the reality of the extermination of the Jews, laws were voted in France against the “Incitement to racial and anti-Semitic hatred”. So Dieudonné, the pseudo humorist but a true professional anti-Semitic activist, is prosecuted not “par le fait du Prince” but for breaching a law. He wrote I am Charlie followed by the name of the killer at the kosher hypermarket.
Ambiguity again. I have been wondering many times how the American could live with a fully accepted first Amendment as regards the freedom of speech and the French needed what we call memorial laws.
Thanks to Charlie, I discovered why. When it comes to sacred and key national matters, your Medias can practice self-censorships which would be unacceptable in France.
I hope not to have been too disturbing for the members of this forum by both my different perspective and by my sort of Parisian English.
De : Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] De la part de Nick Thompson
Envoyé : dimanche 18 janvier 2015 01:59
À : Friam
Objet : [FRIAM] re the French and Furriners
Dear Friamers,
As we tried to cope with the week’s events this Friday, we found ourselves in disagreement about the degree to which the French, in particular, had endorsed multiculturalism. In that connection, I found myself humming the following passage from the French national anthem:
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!
The English is …
To arms citizens Form your battalions
March, march
Let impure blood
Water our furrows
When I visited the French countryside many years ago, there were billboards with blond babies and messages like “keep france strong”. Not sure, if I were a brown person, how comfortable I would feel in a crowd of a million people singing those particular lyrics. Funny how these little antiquated expressions of solidarity can get out of hand.
Whuf!
Nick
PS Just to further the irony, the daily show (yes, yes, I know) reports that the day after the “Je Suis Charlie” rally for freedom of expression, the French police arrested a blogger for expressing anti semitic sentiments. In short, because of their history with Algeria, I am afraid the French have a problem as profound as our own.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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