The 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre is being commemorated with a virtue-signaling concert, a ball of phonies and crocodile tears. The truth is that this satirical newspaper stands alone. The team draws and writes in a bunker, surrounded by armed police, in indifferent solitude. From the outside world, there's nothing but "graveyard silence," Fabrice Nicolino reported in the January 7 issue.
You'd have to be blind or naive not to see the gap between what's put forward and reality. A survey by the Fondation Jean Jaurès, with IFOP, published in Charlie Hebdo on January 7, found that the French are more open to caricature, freedom of expression and even the representation of blasphemy. Let's fine-tune this. If the cartoon concerns religion, responses become more strained. If it also touches on Islam and its prophet, the trouble begins.
Journalist Philippe Lançon, a Charlie survivor of and author of Le Lambeau ("The Flap," 2018), summed up the issue briefly, in the same issue of the weekly publication. The murders "were, in the end, radical censorship." Killings at the Bataclan, at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing elsewhere, killing teachers Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard, stabbing Salman Rushdie 15 times, wounding two people, in 2020, in front of Charlie Hebdo's former offices – they were radical censorship.
Such signals create a climate of fear, with two complementary targets: Education and culture. The consequences are far-reaching. To take just one example, the latest barometer Les Français et le Théâtre ("The French and the Theater"), carried out by Médiamétrie and published in June by the Association for the Support of Private Theater, showed that one person in two is unwilling to see religion addressed on stage.
Loss of artwork
Courage, then, to those artists who might come up with the idea of criticizing Islam or Islamism, of saying that the headscarf is a form of alienation, whether in a painting, a press cartoon, a film, or a show. The wonderful Spanish series La Mesias ("The Messiah"), on the European Arte channel, tackles, among other things, the question of domination in a family sect close to Catholicism. It's not certain that it would have seen the light of day with a Muslim family as its protagonists.
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