A Distinctly French Political Magazine

Charlie Hebdo is a distinctly French political magazine. It grew from a satirical, anti-establishment, sacrilegious tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century, when those fighting for the French Republic took on the monarchy and the Church through cartoons published in pamphlets and the press. From 1960, the year its parent paper appeared, through the January 7 attacks to the present, Charlie Hebdo has been a marginal and marginalized counter-cultural periodical. As a bastion for radical secularism, it continues to hurl scurrilous attacks at Catholicism (in the form of the Pope or Jesus Christ). Religion and orthodoxy of all kinds are often targets of its irreverent humor, directed at not only Catholicism but also Islam and Judaism, in addition to politicians (especially France’s far right), international relations with Israel, and popular culture. However, the paper employs people without regard to their faith and publishes articles defending minority rights. As opposed to individuals, it is the various -isms, the powers-that-be, and the status quo that are the butt of their particular form of crude and sometimes cruel ridicule—the offices, institutions, and dogmas that either govern society or threaten its protected freedoms. This is the spirit that I wish to take up with regard to American colleges and universities.

Some argue that Charlie’s particular brand of humor potentially loses sight of its mission when it attacks the marginalized. Traditionally, Gopnik wrote, the magazine has “punched up”; but when it “punches down,” it appears to stray from its tradition. Such is the case when Charlie Hebdo’s cover depicts images that have compounded Muslims’ feeling of marginalization, whether the Prophet Mohammed or, as was the case in the spring of 2018, a nineteen-year-old female student union leader, a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab. Some of the weekly’s longtime defenders finally objected when the May 23, 2018 edition appeared, portraying the student unflatteringly with protruding teeth and saliva spraying from her mouth. Her appearance in a 10-second news clip on national television just days before, addressing student concerns with France’s educational system and announcing coming protests, had generated criticism and charges of proselytism from a host of state officials and personalities speaking in defense of women’s rights. Although the student wore the hijab voluntarily, they argued that her garb made her a dubious representative of student rights. For Charlie Hebdo’s current director and cartoonist Riss (Laurent Sourisseau), who signed the controversial illustration, the hijab as an institutional symbol as opposed to a personal article of clothing had made its wearer open to this type of cruel caricature. Indeed French law protects individuals from hate speech but it does not protect religions and their doctrines. The controversy elicited by her television appearance followed by the Charlie Hebdo cover did not go unanswered. People objected based on the woman’s right to free expression and, specifically, the right to call her critics’ speech repulsive.

American Academe’s Response

Nevertheless, the response in the US to the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo is instructive to our understanding of American academe, in addition to controversies spurred by the appearances on college campuses of personalities and academics, from the conservative to the provocative (including Ann Coulter, Laura Kipnis, Heather MacDonald, Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, or animal rights activists), following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. New York Times columnist David Brooks was among the first to draw a link between the French weekly and US college campuses when he wrote his column entitled, “I am not Charlie Hebdo” (January 9, 2015). This became a counter-slogan that was repeated on university department websites (Dartmouth, for one); and a number of French programs in institutions of higher learning published on the web detailed positions regarding the paper. Harvard University, to its credit, initiated by the work of French faculty and librarians, brought online a digital collection of Charlie Hebdo artifacts, “The Charlie Archive,” in January 2017. It is publicly accessible and open to outside submissions.[9] Similarly, in the media and press, it was hotly debated whether to show or not to show Charlie Hebdo’s cover design that came out the week following the terrorist attacks and featured the Prophet Mohammed in tears holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign. The Washington Post published it. USA Today and the Los Angeles Times posted images of the cover on their websites. Other US media and news outlets explained their decision not to show the cover out of concern for their journalists in the field. This was the argument of The New York Times and the PBS Newshour, on which Brooks appears regularly as a political commentator.

A Guarded Room at the MLA Convention

Security from the perceived abuses and violence of free speech, as these examples point out, has become a student demand and an administrative priority on American campuses. More often than not, it takes the form of safe spaces and Bias Response Teams, as at my state institution. Sometimes, however, it requires expensive, elaborate plans and armed police officers; and, particularly since the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, the question speakers and faculty and students must be asking themselves, beyond cost, is “Am I willing to die for my right to free speech?”, or free listening, as the case may be.[12] This question crossed my mind when I attended a panel on “Charlie Hebdo and Its Publics” at the 2016 Modern Language Association convention in Austin. Attendance at the panel required going past security guards, and not only was it surreal, but it also allowed me, in my privileged Ivory Tower position as a tenured university professor and researcher of French literature, to reflect on the question.

Inside the guarded room, international scholars walked us through the process that led to the 2005 publication of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the provincial Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, three of which were republished in 2006 in Charlie Hebdo. The project was originally intended to be an experiment. Editors wished to gauge the reach of self-censorship among forty-two members of the union of newspaper illustrators. Not all of the illustrators responded and of those who did, not all of them depicted the Prophet in their drawings. Their publication generated, as readers may recall, death threats, general outrage and riots in Muslim countries, and controversy among Muslims in the West. Members of the MLA panel showed and discussed the different messages of each; and what ensued was a discussion of the different cultural perspectives that collided in this project, now a time marker in history. As Jytte Klausen reports in her 2009 book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, the fact that some of the cartoons (and one, in particular by Kurt Westergaard) gave demonstrable evidence to Muslims of the

Danes’ disrespect for Islam, it was not the conclusion the artist had intended. . . . He intended his drawing to show that radical Muslims use the Prophet’s name to justify violence. He did not for a minute consider that Muslims would interpret his drawings the other way around, as intended to show that the Prophet is the source of violence.[13]

The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo agreed, which led them to republish some of the cartoons, including a new cover of the Prophet by artist Cabu (Jean Cabut), also one of the assassinated cartoonists. Cabu’s drawing, however, respected Muslims’ sensibilities by not showing Mohammed’s likeness. It depicted an aggrieved Mohammed covering his face with his hands and made the distinction that Westergaard had intended: “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons” (“It’s hard to be loved by f—— idiots.”[14]). These examples lead us to another consequence of the ideological ambiguity of this brand of cartooning. It can suggest that artists are ignorant of the Other whom one’s drawing engages in a dialogue, or, as in the case of Cabu, that they knowingly play with the Other–whether or not it is perceived as respectful is another matter. More dangerously, this ambiguity can lead one to the conclusion that the artist is engaging in all-out cultural warfare against those who are likewise the keepers of a dogma. All of these possibilities are worthy of intellectual inquiry.

In academe there should be room for reasoned dialogue and exchange in which different parties listen and engage freely, both honestly and respectfully. It is not entirely clear to me that this is what occurred in this MLA conference room, where a security guard was literally protecting free speech to the extent that freedom is possible in a policed location. It was a sobering brush with reality where the guard stood as a reminder that a difference of beliefs and opinion, even as a topic of inquiry, can leave one vulnerable to a deadly encounter. While the dialogue may not have been entirely unfettered and honest, in this hotel conference room in Austin, there was nevertheless the possibility for discussion and the exchange of ideas and resources, some of which had been limited prior.

Specifically, in that room researchers projected graphic content that had previously been censored by a number of publishers and bookstores in this country. In 2006, Borders and Waldenbooks refused to sell an issue of Free Inquiry, a monthly magazine, because it republished the Danish cartoons that had appeared in Jyllands-Posten. As Klausen points out in her book, “It was a meaningless gesture because the images were at the time freely available over the Internet,” although “they are often marred by obscene commentary and misleading translations of the Danish captions.”[15] Likewise, although Yale University Press published Klausen’s book, it did not include any of the twelve cartoons (even those that did not depict the Prophet). Also absent from its pages are a drawing for a children’s book, a Turkish miniature, and Gustave Doré’s image of Mohammed being tormented in Hell. Klausen also explains that she shielded the identities of her sources (including authors) and used more anonymous sources than she would have liked. “It is a testimony,” she writes, “to the delicacy of the circumstances of the [worldwide] protests that there is little room for dissent on all sides in the conflict” (12). Open dialogue is not always an easy endeavor.

Self-Censorship in French Studies?

On another panel at the conference, I presented a paper entitled “Free Speech Rights: France as a case in point.” I addressed the pall that the fear of terrorism had cast on speech in France and the danger of self-censorship in my field of French studies and more generally in the American intelligentsia. What had finally pushed me to address the latter topics was a reader’s report from a scholarly journal, not recommending the publication of one of my articles, a retrospective study of two Franco-Algerian politicians who had worked in conservative governments, Azouz Begag (delegate Minister for Equal Opportunities in Dominique de Villepin’s government, 2005-2007) and Fadela Amara (Secretary of State of Urban Policy in François Fillon’s second government, 2007-2010).[16] With no explanation, one reader had asserted that the article was “dangerous,” and the other directed me to sociological studies that I had not included. Whether or not my article was ready for publication is not what most concerned me; rather, it was the nature of the response I received.

Afterward, I sought advice from a senior colleague in the field, who alerted me to the article’s violation of political correctness barriers. It was addressing the advances that Muslim political appointees had made toward normalizing French Muslims in politics and the media in a post-9/11 period marked by not only xenophobia but also controversy surrounding the anti-immigration and specifically anti-Muslim policies of Interior Minister and later President Nicolas Sarkozy. The examination of multicultural advances gained through the service of government officials linked to Sarkozy, in whom caricaturists traditionally accentuate the demonic, had been my error.

These center-right administrations had long received the critical attention of university researchers, including myself. However, I was seeking to understand their role in the subsequent election of representatives of Muslim origin to French Parliament for the first time in 2012.[17] Not one Muslim had been elected to France’s most powerful legislative chamber before, which raised questions in my mind. For instance, what had galvanized members of this minority population to become political actors during Jacques Chirac’s presidency? What had led them to turn away from the Socialist Party and take positions in conservative, even controversial governments that took up a problematic debate on national identity, passed legislation banning religious insignia in public schools (following years of reported dismissals of Muslim school girls who refused to remove their head covering), and enacted immigration laws discouraging family reunification through the use of DNA tests? Now, some years later, I continue to ponder what role the visibility of Begag, Amara, and others played in the 2012 electoral breakthrough for Muslim politicians, beyond President François Hollande’s political appointments (I am thinking, in particular, of Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem who served in Manuel Vall’s second cabinet 2014-2017 after serving as the Minister for Women’s Rights, 2012- 2014, and adopted a stance on the burkini that distanced her from the Prime Minister).[18] My “dangerous” article was seeking to understand the ways in which a new political force was taking form and the shape and arc of its contours.

Enter Michel Houellebecq

A book that made a sensation, launched on the same day of the Charlie Hebdo killings, and which quickly sold out, Soumission, a satire by Michel Houellebecq, has since given me insight into the phenomenon that I had been attempting to discern. It, too, however, was deemed “dangerous” and the author—which academe has tepidly embraced—condemned as “irresponsible.” French thinkers slammed its portrait of a France under the leadership of a Muslim president, Mohammed Ben Abbes, with the charge of Islamophobia.[19] In the France of this imagining, arranged marriages and polygamy are allowed, women deprived of their right to work, and the education system funded by Saudi magnates. Houellebecq pushed back against his book’s detractors by questioning their interpretation. Ben Abbes, he argued, is a political moderate, educated in the country’s elite École Nationale d’Administration, the institution where France’s high officials receive training, as well as an ambitious and skilled tactician who wins the election against the National Front Party candidate, Marine Le Pen, by forming alliances with the Socialist Party and the conservative Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) Party. Once elected, Ben Abbes succeeds in lowering France’s chronically high unemployment rate, which reduces criminality, and expands the European Union to the Mediterranean basin through peaceful accords, all the while maintaining under his control radical elements within his Muslim Fraternity Party. Houellebecq also dismissed the contention that the novel would give impetus to the National Front and its anti-immigrant, anti-European Union platform, by rejecting the notion that a book could change the course of history.

Remarkably, on the eve of his book’s launch, Houellebecq, France’s best-selling and most internationally read contemporary author, was compelled to defend his professional freedom as a writer by arguing that his novel’s Muslim hero—fully integrated and electorally elevated to the highest office in France—would have no impact, positive or negative, on the country’s future, only to learn hours afterward of the jihadist attacks and of the death of his good friend, the economist Bernard Maris, who was on the Charlie Hebdo writing staff and among the victims. In mourning, Houellebecq cancelled scheduled promotional events and proclaimed solidarity with the magazine, stating, “Je suis Charlie.” Then this conservative, self-proclaimed agnostic atheist, the author of a story exploring religion’s draw, so powerful that, in the world of his novel at least, it eclipses France’s staunch proponents of the secular state and educational system, left a France he described as decidedly right-leaning for a kind of spiritual retreat. The real danger in his book, as he had revealed to the public and his critics prior to the attack, was captured in the pages preceding the election of Ben Abbes, when Marine Le Pen’s victory appeared all but certain and unidentified masked gunmen were storming polling places to steal the ballot boxes and put an end to the vote. How had this message been lost? In Houellebecq’s admonishment, he pointed to a potentially grave consequence of the primacy of pluralism over freedom of expression, that is, intellectual laziness, the charge Columbia University political scientist and historian Mark Lilla had leveled against Todd’s influential essay and critique of the #JeSuisCharlie movement, Qui est Charlie?[20]

The phenomenon is far from new, however, and the charge of lazy thinking to be considered carefully. Included in Yale French Studies’ 2010 issue, titled “Turns to the Right?”—with a French road sign on the cover and the caption, “Virage dangereux à droite. Signalisation de danger. Annonce d’un virage à droite à une distance de 150 m en rase campagne et 50 m en agglomération” (“Dangerous right-turn. Warning sign. Notice of a right-turn from 150m in open country and 50m in urban areas”)—one finds Douglas Morrey’s enlightening analysis of the subject of “sexual frustration” in Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Titled “Sex and the Single Male: Houellebecq, Feminism, and Hegemonic Masculinity,” the article examines Houellebecq’s thesis on the frustration of single men who find themselves marginalized in the social hierarchy of the post-1968 liberalized sexual marketplace. Morrey’s study focuses on earlier works, but the description applies to Soumission’s protagonist, a specialist of the 19^th-century French novelist Joris Karl Huysmans and middle-aged, melancholic, university professor named François.

The portrait of the university professor is of interest to us here. When Ben Abbes’s election seems imminent, François’s Jewish girlfriend Myriam, one of his former students, departs with her family for Israel, leaving him alone to face a bleak future of waning sexual performance and pleasureless sex with prostitutes. François initially takes the principled decision to take early retirement rather than follow new university policy and convert to Islam, which would allow him to continue working. He then rethinks his decision when invited back by the rector Robert Rediger, who offers him the added bonus of an arranged marriage. The salary would afford François three wives, he adds. This aspect of the new regime effectively resolves the need for sexual dominance as here articulated by Rediger in an attempt to persuade François.

Men are animals, all right; but . . . . [what] ensures their dominant position in nature, . . . is truly their intelligence. So, I’ll tell you in all seriousness: there is nothing abnormal about professors being classified among dominant males. . . . In their natural state, of course, women, like men, are above all attracted by physical attributes; but you can, with an appropriate upbringing, succeed in convincing them that that is not what is most important. You can lead them to be attracted to rich men—and, after all, getting rich already requires more intelligence and cunning than the average. You can even, to a certain degree, impress on them the high erotic value of university professors…[21]

The public effacement of women at first startles François, but then he is lulled as though into a dream. Although François envisions no promising future intellectual pursuits in his new state of submission, in this case to Allah, a quiet serenity washes over him at the prospect of a “devoted” and “submissive” Muslim wife.[22]

French Feminism and French Academe

French sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, a darling of American academe, particularly in French studies, had previously censured Amara as a “French feminist” in her work Les Féministes et le Garçon arabe. She had charged Amara specifically with doing a disservice to Arab boys by adopting a French feminist framework in her defense of (“subaltern”) Muslim women in neighborhoods Amara claimed were under the control of radical political Islam. Guénif-Souilamas argued in a subsequent essay, “The Inflated Ego,” that by playing the role of victim, Amara was not only reinstating patriarchal power but also feeding the negative stereotype of violent Arab men and recklessly sensationalizing a societal problem, caused by the “inquisitorial,” “hegemonic, republican, universalist regime” in all its forms.[24]

Amara’s argument was abrasive, if not “dangerous,” for its lack of self-reflexive awareness—which I claim one finds in Houellebecq’s Soumission through its characterization of French academe in the self-doubting and self-serving figure of François. Nevertheless, Amara’s ideological and linguistic vehemence equally came from a place of vulnerability as the daughter of Muslim immigrants. Through her political activity, she was seeking to overthrow patriarchy in general, including French cultural biases that exclude Muslim women from “notre pays,” as she stressed in a 2010 Laurent Ruquier interview. Although she shares the goal to emancipate both the Muslim woman and the homosexual Arab with none other than her fiercest critic, Guénif-Souilamas, the two approach the problem with diametrically opposed strategies.

Contrary to a common leftist bias against the police, perceived as agents of violent escalation as much as they restore order, and particularly where racial tensions run high, Amara expressed her firm support for a zero-tolerance police policy in high-crime areas: “The Republican order is emancipating. . . . I consider one’s right to safety to be a fundamental right. It’s not because you’re poor that you don’t have a right to security and serenity.”[25] On the other hand, Guénif-Souilamas, true to leftist principles, dismisses cultural and political figures, including the police, as agents of structural racism. However, she does this in a manner that verges on the burlesque. As a result, her broad condemnation of racism in twenty-first-century secular French society, much like Houellebecq’s treatment of feminism, reduces her subjects to mere puppets, depriving her of valuable interlocutors who might alert her to her blind spots or to areas where her expertise could prove valuable.

Conclusion: How To Bridge the Gap?

In the end, I find a reinvigorated interest in the genres of satire and the baroque, the Carnaval spirit of Charlie Hebdo, as vehicles for free expression and subversion. Both Charlie Hebdo and Soumission made the disruptive power of these genres clear to me, not only by their beating the economic odds—what loan-strapped student in the twenty-first century would go to college to become a cartoon journalist or novelist?—but also with regard to power structures and victimization. Although their heretical irreverence risks blinding them to their own excesses, their assertion of freedom is compelling.[30]

Guénif-Souilamas’s basic point is valid: how can one give voice to voiceless victims or how can victims escape victimhood from structural oppression without victimizing a category of people identified with this power structure in return? Looking to contemporary voices in France’s Muslim minority population, one is struck by the struggle to define the course for youths; and this struggle has pitted two very different assimilated Muslim women, Amara and Guénif-Souilamas, against one another, against French thinkers and activists, and against Maghrebi intellectuals such as Daoud, a member of a secular minority living in his homeland.

When looking to the young people in the U.S., I see and hear the same debates here over language, dress, sex, visibility, representation, and the option to unplug or, terrifyingly, drop out. I also recall Houellebecq’s observation that religion is making a political comeback. People, feeling overwhelmed and marginalized in this hypertechnological world of incomprehensible algorithms dictating to whom and to what we are exposed, marketed, and sold, are seeking more than visual stimuli or material comforts to fill the void that can only be satisfied with human thought, philosophy or religion. Honesty, or at least authenticity, humor, holding the powerful to account, all conducive to dialogue, seem to be common denominators to their needs. When we look at the news or turn to our screens, we confront a dangerous world, which can be scary but also a call to make connections that we might otherwise not make. In such circumstances, it seems essential that the message not get lost or be misconstrued—a matter of personal responsibility, yes, but also a challenge when we do not master the codes, know the rules, find an open ear, or see the humor of inside jokes. When on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out, our frustration or misunderstanding growing due to the gap, we have a choice. How we choose to bridge that gap is a test of ourselves and of society. These are the lessons that these cartoonists who died for a drawing bring home to me.