ADAM GOPNIK: Satire Lives
The magazine was offensive to Jews, offensive to Muslims,
offensive to Catholics, offensive to feminists, offensive to the right and to
the left, while being aligned with it—offensive to everybody, equally. (The
name Charlie Hebdo came into being, in part, in response to a
government ban that had put an earlier version of the magazine out of business;
it was both a tribute to Charlie Brown and a mockery of Charles de Gaulle.) The
right to mock and to blaspheme and to make religions and politicians and bien-pensants all
look ridiculous was what the magazine held dear, and it is what its cartoonists
were killed for—and we diminish their sacrifice if we give their actions
shelter in another kind of piety or make them seem too noble, when what they
pursued was the joy of ignobility.
A small irreverent smile comes to the lips at the thought of
the flag being lowered, as it was throughout France last week, for these
anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of
being solemnly mourned and marched for by former President Nicolas Sarkozy and
the current President, François Hollande. The cartoonists didn’t just mock
those men’s politics; they regularly amplified their sexual appetites and
diminished their sexual appurtenances. It is wonderful to see Pope Francis
condemning the horror, but also worth remembering that magazine’s special
Christmas issue, titled “The True Story of Baby Jesus,” whose cover bore a
drawing of a startled Mary giving notably frontal birth to her child. (Did the
Pope see it?)
Charlie Hebdo was—will be again, let us hope—a
satirical journal of a kind these days found in France almost alone. Not at all
meta or ironic, like The Onion, or a place for political gossip,
like the Paris weekly Le Canard Enchaîné or London’s Private
Eye, it kept alive the nineteenth-century style of direct, high-spirited,
and extremely outrageous caricature—a tradition begun by now legendary
caricaturists, like Honoré Daumier and his editor Charles Philipon, who drew
the head of King Louis-Philippe as a pear and, in 1831, was put on trial for
lèse-majesté.
Philipon’s famous faux-naïf demonstration of the process of
caricature still brings home the almost primitive kind of image magic that
clings to the act of cartooning. In what way was he guilty, Philipon demanded
to know, since the King’s head was pear-shaped, and how could
merely simplifying it to its outline be viewed as an attack? The coarser and
more scabrous cartoons that marked the covers of Charlie Hebdo—and
took in Jesus and Moses, along with Muhammad; angry rabbis and ranting bishops,
along with imams—were the latest example of that tradition. In the era of the
Internet, when images proliferate, merge, and alter in an Adobe second, one
would think that the power of a simple, graffiti-like scrawl was minimal.
Indeed, analysts of images and their life have been telling us for years that
this sort of reaction couldn’t happen anymore—that the omnipresence of images
meant they could not offend, that their meanings and their capacity to shock
were enfeebled by repetition and availability.
Even as the Islamist murderers struck in Paris , some media-studies maven in a
liberal-arts college was doubtless explaining that the difference between our
time and times past is that the ubiquity of images benumbs us and their
proliferation makes us indifferent. Well, not quite. It is the images that
enrage; many things drove the fanatics to their act, but it was cartoons they
chose to fixate on. Drawings are handmade, the living sign of an ornery human
intention, rearing up against a piety.
For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it
really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a
game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood
messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their
memory. Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré: like soccer players in Brazil , each was known in France by a
single name. A small irreverent smile comes to the lips at the thought of the
flag being lowered, as it was throughout France last week, for these
anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of
being solemnly mourned and marched for by former President Nicolas Sarkozy and
the current President, François Hollande. The cartoonists didn’t just mock
those men’s politics; they regularly amplified their sexual appetites and
diminished their sexual appurtenances. It is wonderful to see Pope Francis
condemning the horror, but also worth remembering that magazine’s special
Christmas issue, titled “The True Story of Baby Jesus,” whose cover bore a
drawing of a startled Mary giving notably frontal birth to her child. (Did the
Pope see it?)
Nor was it only people’s pieties that the cartoonists liked
to tweak. Georges Wolinski, eighty years old, born of a Polish Jewish father
and a Tunisian Jewish mother, caused a kerfuffle two years ago by creating a
poster—for the Communist Party, no less—in favor of early retirement, which
showed a happily retired man grabbing the rear ends of two apparently compliant
miniskirted women. “Life Begins at Sixty” was the jaunty caption. Yet Wolinski,
for all his provocations, was a life-affirming and broadly cultured bon vivant, who
became something of an institution; in 2005, he was awarded the Légion d’
Honneur, the highest French decoration.
In recent years, Charlie Hebdo has had to
scrabble for money. It gets lots of attention, but satirical magazines of
opinion are no easier to finance in France
than they are in America .
Still, Wolinski and his confederates represented the true Rabelaisian spirit of
French civilization, in their acceptance of human appetite and their contempt
for false high-mindedness of any kind, including the secular high-mindedness
that liberal-minded people hold dear. The magazine was offensive to Jews,
offensive to Muslims, offensive to Catholics, offensive to feminists, offensive
to the right and to the left, while being aligned with it—offensive to
everybody, equally. (The name Charlie Hebdo came into being,
in part, in response to a government ban that had put an earlier version of the
magazine out of business; it was both a tribute to Charlie Brown and a mockery
of Charles de Gaulle.) The right to mock and to blaspheme and to make religions
and politicians and bien-pensants all look ridiculous was what
the magazine held dear, and it is what its cartoonists were killed for—and we
diminish their sacrifice if we give their actions shelter in another kind of
piety or make them seem too noble, when what they pursued was the joy of
ignobility.
As the week came to its grim end, with the
assassins dead and several hostages—taken not by chance in a kosher grocery
store - dead, too, one’s thoughts As the week came to its grim end, with
the assassins dead and several hostages—taken not by chance in a kosher grocery
store—dead, too, one’s thoughts turned again to the inextinguishable French
tradition of dissent, the tradition of Zola, sustained through so much violence
and so many civic commotions. “Nothing Sacred” was the motto on the banner of
the cartoonists who died, and who were under what turned out to be the tragic
illusion that the Republic could protect them from the wrath of faith. “Nothing
Sacred”: we forget at our ease, sometimes, and in the pleasure of shared
laughter, just how noble and hard-won this motto can be.
