Almost everyone knows Alain Finkielkraut and his commitment to all the victims of “Islamic fundamentalism”, which seeks to “murder freedom”.
In 2002 he defended Oriana Fallaci in the columns of Le Point (No. 1549, 24/05/2002) over her pamphlet The Rage and the Pride. In an article entitled “Fallaci tries to look reality in the face”, he expressed his astonishment: “We are living through that strange moment in our history when, to be virtuous, to be moral, to be a decent sort, one must make sure that the truth never comes to the surface.” And he added: “Oriana Fallaci has the signal merit of not allowing herself to be intimidated by the virtuous lie. She speaks bluntly, she strives to look reality in the face. She rejects the penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of what it is the victim of.”
In the daily Libération of 9 February 2006, he wrote about the Danish cartoons crisis under the provocative title “Fanatics without borders: Islamist fundamentalists are formidable enemies”:
“Who bears primary responsibility for this crisis? ‘The cartoonists and journalists who failed to temper the exercise of freedom of expression with respect for beliefs’, say most Western heads of government now and, with them, a number of intellectuals. These sages forget that respect for beliefs and freedom of expression are two sides of the same coin. Those who fight freedom of expression in the name of respect for their beliefs despise the beliefs of others, and make this very ostentatiously known. […] The image that set off the powder keg shows Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. An insulting image, we are told. A wounding link, an offensive link, a defamatory link between the Prophet and terrorism. No doubt. But this link was not established by the Danish cartoonists; it was established by the jihadists. […] It is not enough, in order to live in a peaceful world, or even to have peace, to renounce all spirit of conquest, to confess one’s crimes and to proclaim urbi et orbi that one has no enemies. The proof: we do all this ardently, and we must acknowledge that, despite our efforts, we have determined and formidable enemies.”
In the columns of Le Figaro of 27 November 2006, under the title “The Redecker affair and the wound to freedom”, he wrote:
“France was the country of Voltaire crushing the Infamous. Fortunately it was not only that, but it was that too. In recent weeks I have anxiously wondered whether France was not becoming the country where the Infamous could crush Voltaire, as if nothing had happened or, at least, with very, very extenuating circumstances. […] Everyone, or almost everyone, repeated that freedom of expression was an inalienable right, but the first reflex of the Minister of National Education, soon echoed by his colleague at Culture, was to remind this effervescent civil servant of his duty of restraint. While the Human Rights League judged his ideas ‘nauseating’, Le Canard enchaîné railed against him, and the Islam scholar Olivier Roy wrote in the review Esprit that ‘one cannot distinguish a bad racism (Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism) from a good one such as Redecker’s would be’, going further by telling the newspaper Libération that ‘those who deliberately amuse themselves by tickling the fatwa’ should not be surprised at the reactions their idiotic provocation arouses. As for the journalist and novelist Gilles Martin-Chauffier, he gave free rein to his disgust and wrote this: ‘It takes staggering intellectual dishonesty to sign a column as hate-filled as Robert Redecker’s. And it is spitting in the face of freedom of thought to take up the defence of this simpleton who thinks only of gaining the notoriety that opens the doors of the major publishers.’ So as not to pour oil on the fire, discredit was poured by the handful on the troublemaker. Less than a year after the cartoons affair, nobody anywhere could think of anything better than to reproach him for being a caricature. It is therefore high time to free the yes to Redecker from the but that hampers it, stifles it and finally gags it. If we do not want to allow the reign of self-censorship to take hold in the public sphere, our support must be unconditional. There can be no buts, for that but would lead tomorrow to purging bookshops and libraries of works as Islamically incorrect as Naipaul’s Beyond Belief or Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.”
And finally he concluded:
“And then, it is too often forgotten: freedom of expression is no sinecure. This human right is not only my right. Man is me, but not only me. Man is also other men and their unbearable right to say things I do not wish to hear, things that irritate me, frighten me, hurt me, overwhelm me, flay me alive, cause me pain. In an open society, no conviction is sovereign, which is why they are all angry. ‘My freedom does not have the last word; I am not alone,’ writes Emmanuel Levinas. That is no doubt why freedom of expression is so fragile. There are people who want to be alone or, more precisely, to be alone in being. It is up to us to inhibit this desire, to overcome it within ourselves and outside ourselves. It is clearly a matter of life and death.”
Until then, Alain Finkielkraut had always been consistent and coherent. Recently, however, I happened to hear part of the programme “Le zapping de France Inter” (10 November 2007), on which he was a guest; he was commenting, in a somewhat surprising way, on the ban imposed on Bertrand Cantat on his release “from publishing a book, writing a song or speaking publicly in any way whatsoever about the crime he committed”.
Here is an extract from what he said:
“I think this moment should be kept, published, immortalised. It is a monstrous moment. I do say absolutely monstrous. In the name of freedom of expression, people are coming to claim the right to pure barbarity; there should be no need for a law to forbid Cantat from writing a song about the death of Marie Trintignant. And I have given him enough credit to think that even if there had been no law, he would not have done it. Because this man is struck by the act he committed. No, he is not the child-beater, the violent man some have tried to portray; his case is unique. Nonetheless, he killed, accidentally or not, a woman he loved. And I do not think he would have it in mind to hurt her mother, her family, her children, by writing a song about these events.”
The presenter then challenged him: “Mr Finkielkraut, if you will allow me, let us go back to the very principle of prohibition and censorship: is it not counterproductive? We are in total Bovarysme, and…?” But he was quickly interrupted by Finkielkraut:
“No, censorship is civilisation itself. Come now, one cannot put the true and the false on an equal footing! Censorship is the law. The law sets limits. I think that normally civilisation must set limits. If people are so obsessed with freedom of expression that the law is needed, then long live the law! But to think that this is something new, and for a lawyer to dare say that it is something new – I do not know who this commentator is; he has the right to know nothing about the law and nothing about civilisation – all the same, when someone who has killed another person is released in the country where that person was killed, people simply want this release not to be a breach of public order. And that exists in law. A breach of public order means that if I write this or that about Marie Trintignant, I will hurt her mother, I will hurt her former husbands, I will wound her children; that is a breach of public order, and that breach must not happen. And I repeat, there is no connection between what Cantat feels and those who, in his name, demand that there be no limits, who demand a sort of ‘anything goes’ which is barbarity itself.”
To sum up:
1) When Alain Finkielkraut is faced with statements that offend the sensibilities of more than a billion human beings, including several million in France, he asserts that:
– We are living through that strange moment in our history when, to be virtuous, to be moral, to be a decent sort, one must make sure that the truth never comes to the surface.
– Oriana Fallaci has the signal merit of not allowing herself to be intimidated by the virtuous lie.
– Those who fight freedom of expression in the name of respect for their beliefs despise the beliefs of others.
– It is not enough, in order to live in a peaceful world, to renounce all spirit of conquest, to confess one’s crimes and to proclaim urbi et orbi that one has no enemies.
– I have anxiously wondered whether France was not becoming the country where the Infamous could crush Voltaire.
– If we do not want to allow the reign of self-censorship to take hold in the public sphere, our support [for Redecker] must be unconditional. There can be no buts.
– Freedom of expression is no sinecure. This human right is not only my right. Man is me, but not only me. Man is also other men and their unbearable right to say things I do not wish to hear, things that irritate me, frighten me, hurt me, overwhelm me, flay me alive, cause me pain.
– In an open society, no conviction is sovereign.
– “My freedom does not have the last word; I am not alone,” writes Emmanuel Levinas. That is no doubt why freedom of expression is so fragile. There are people who want to be alone or, more precisely, to be alone in being. It is up to us to inhibit this desire, to overcome it within ourselves and outside ourselves. It is clearly a matter of life and death.
2) But when Alain Finkielkraut is faced with words that risk offending the sensibilities of a few human beings, he asserts instead that:
– In the name of freedom of expression, people are coming to claim the right to pure barbarity.
– That sort of “anything goes” which is barbarity itself.
– One cannot put the true and the false on an equal footing.
– Censorship is civilisation itself.
– Censorship is the law.
– Normally civilisation must set limits. If people are so obsessed with freedom of expression that the law is needed, then long live the law!
– A breach of public order means that if I write this or that about Marie Trintignant, I will hurt her mother, I will hurt her former husbands, I will wound her children; that is a breach of public order, and that breach must not happen.
Conclusion : Either Alain Finkielkraut’s thinking on the limits of freedom of expression has evolved – after all, one has the right to change. Or else he has a curious way of conceiving of a breach of public order.
Abbas Aroua, 8 December 2007
