The satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was the conscious heir to a French intellectual tradition with a long history: radical anticlericalism.
Before the Charlie Hebdo era (the magazine dates from the late 1960s), France’s most influential anticlerical thinkers trained their fire on Catholicism—for centuries the country’s state religion. As a rule, however, these individuals objected not so much to precise points of religious doctrine as to the fanaticism, ignorance and persecution that, in their view, tended to accompany “true faith.” The opponents of doctrinaire Catholicism used caricature, irony and humorous blasphemy—thus setting the tone for Charlie Hebdo’s later fight with jihadist Islam.
Anticlerical French thought traces its origins to rambunctious early Catholic practices such as Carnival, in which Christian morality was temporarily and gleefully suspended, as well as to Renaissance literary representations of priests as importunate louts. In François Rabelais’s “Gargantua” (1534), the eponymous hero rails against monks because they “neither plow, like the peasant, nor heal the sick, like the doctor” but instead “harass the whole neighborhood by rattling their church-bells” and mumbling “countless legends and psalms they don’t even understand.”
Anticlericalism reached its apogee during the Enlightenment. Brandishing finely honed logic and wicked humor, the philosophes gleefully mocked what they saw as the inconsistencies and absurdities of Church dogma. Voltaire excelled at this technique. In his novella “L’Ingénu” (1767), a gaggle of small-town priests and parishioners decides to convert an Amerindian “savage”—only to see their plan go comically awry when the newcomer makes a quick study of the Bible and then demands that they comply with all of its directives, from circumcision (generally dismissed by Voltaire’s contemporaries as a “Jewish” practice) to baptism in a river (rather than at a baptismal font).
In Voltaire’s satirical “Dictionnaire Philosophique” (1764), he imagines a theological debate between a philosophe and a religious zealot. When the former carries a point by citing ecclesiastical authorities, his opponent replies, “Come, now. Neither they nor God will stop us from burning you alive; that’s the punishment for…philosophers who don’t share our opinions.” Voltaire himself escaped destruction by fire, but the Church condemned his “Dictionnaire” and other works to the flames.
The Marquis de Sade took “enlightened” anticlericalism to even more shocking extremes. His novels portray monasteries as hotbeds of frantic buggery. One novel, “La Philosophie dans le boudoir” (c. 1793), reviles the Virgin Mary as a “dirty, shameless slut” and Jesus Christ as a “scoundrel,” a “creep” and a “despot.” Unsurprisingly, these pronouncements landed Sade in serious trouble. To this day, he remains the only French author to have served prison time under four successive political regimes.
After World War I, the French Surrealist movement revived Sade’s legacy and made him a hero of avant-garde rebellion. They found in Sade a bracing antidote to the morality of the ruling classes, which had invoked God and country while sending millions of young men to die in the trenches. The Surrealist filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí ended their virulently anticlerical masterpiece, “L’Age d’or,” with a Sadean vignette, with one of the novelist’s most depraved characters, the Duc de Blangis, emerging from an orgy dressed as Jesus Christ. When the film came out, this scene so outraged Catholic sensibilities that an extremist youth group staged a riot in the movie theater, tossing tear-gas bombs and beating up members of the audience.
For all their focus on militant Islam, the editors of Charlie Hebdo, as heirs to this tradition, didn’t give Catholicism a pass either. One of the weekly’s more graphic covers—a response to the rejection of gay marriage by the archbishop of Paris, André Vingt-Trois—shows the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in a lewd ménage à trois beneath the caption: “Msgr. Vingt-Trois Has Three Daddies.” But as the magazine’s director, Stéphane Charbonnier (better known to readers under his pen name Charb), noted in 2012, his paper’s anti-Catholic caricatures never triggered the kind of violent backlash generated by its anti-Muslim ones: “We could show the pope sodomizing a mole and get no reaction.”
It is a key point. The imperviousness of modern-day Catholics to Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire is itself a byproduct of French anticlerical culture. After more than 500 years of ridicule, Catholicism has finally become “banalized” (that is, lost its status as a taboo subject), in a neologism coined by Charb himself in 2012. He went on to say, “We have to keep at it until Islam is as banalized as Catholicism.” Charb was among those murdered on Wednesday.
—Dr. Weber is a professor of French at Barnard College. Her books include “Terror and Its Discontents” and “Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution.”
_____
De THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 10-11/01/2015
Imagen: An anticlerical caricature, c. 1754, shows an abbé fattened by corruption. UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
No comments:
Post a Comment