Forum Introduction Tolerance, Free Speech, and Civility from Voltaire to Charlie Hebdo
Dena Goodman · Studies in eighteenth century culture/Studies in eighteenth-century culture · 2018
Forum Introduction Tolerance, Free Speech, and Civility from Voltaire to Charlie Hebdo Dena Goodman (bio) On 7 January 2015, terrorists entered the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, slaughtered twelve editors and cartoonists and wounded several more. The next day, in an article titled “Écrasé par l’infâme: Un journal héritier de la tradition satirique à la française à la défense d’une liberté d’expression absolue,” the media critic of Le Devoir noted that “La lutte contre l’intolérance (l’ ‘infâme’ de Voltaire) a été la grande affaire de Voltaire et des Lumières.”1 In the days and weeks that followed the author of the Traité sur la tolérance was repeatedly enlisted on behalf of Charlie Hebdo’s right to speak out against religious fanaticism in the name of reason. On 11 January Parisians held copies of Voltaire’s treatise aloft like standards as they marched up the Boulevard Voltaire to the Place de la République, declaring: “Je suis Charlie.”2 Two days later, an American ex-patriot living in Paris blogged on the Huffington Post: I can’t say that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were entirely to my taste, nor would they perhaps have been to Voltaire’s. But the old homme de lettres would have challenged us that in a truly [End Page 247] free society, we must police our own judgments as fiercely as we police our borders. That without the liberty to be tasteless and puerile, there is no liberty to be innovative and sublime. That religions—all religions—are a free society’s natural enemies until they reconcile themselves to tolerance, skepticism, and humor. That enlightenment, finally, is not an age, or a country, but an ancient and humane idea in constant battle with the darkness outside and inside us.3 On 18 January, the Guardian reported that the French publisher Gallimard was printing 10,000 copies of Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance. By then a poster featuring a young but stern-looking Voltaire emblazoned with the words, “Je suis Charlie,” was plastered all over Paris. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paris, 11 July 2016. Photograph courtesy of Anne Depaulis, posted on Voltaire Foundation blog, 12 July 2016. https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/voltaire-je-suis-charlie/. Accessed 19 December 2016. [End Page 248] The centrality of Voltaire to the French response to the attack seemed to demand some kind of intervention by those of us who have made the Enlightenment our central scholarly concern. That spring the Société Française d’Etude du Dix-Huitième Siècle published Tolérance: le combat des Lumières, a paperback anthology of quotations from a broad range of Enlightenment authors. Distributed in newsstands throughout France, it sold for less than 5 euros. Catriona Seth, president of the society, closed her introduction to the volume by calling upon her readers to defend the utopian ideal of the Republic of Letters “par tous les moyens démocratiques” and to find a way to rise “comme citoyens, de la société à laquelle nous aspirons.”4 In January 2016, on the anniversary of the attack, Open Book published a translation of the French volume in the UK. A project of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it can be downloaded for free in pdf. Readers downloaded it 10,000 times the first week.5 With this forum, the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies (ASECS’s French caucus) aims to stimulate a wide-ranging conversation about Charlie Hebdo, the attack on it, and the French response. Each of the interventions that follows calls into question any simple understanding of the Enlightenment legacy for France today. Each author asks us to go beyond waving a Voltairean flag to think more deeply about what lessons we might learn from the Enlightenment in the wake of this horrific event. The first three papers take a closer look at Voltaire. Jeffrey Leichman argues provocatively that it is not Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance, but his play Mahomet—an “unapproachable, racist, offensive, outdated” play—that we should be teaching in the wake...