The final impression I get of the Charlie Hebdo 68ers is one of ineffectuality.
The magazine has the same look as all those satirical papers in the Anglosphere that flowered in the 70s and ran out of gas soon after (Oz, Private Eye), whose only ideology was ‘freaking out the squares’. That this type of magazine lasted longer in France I would blame on the strange French skew on culture (Jerry Lewis, EdgarPo).
The idea of treading a fine line between the ideologies, satirising both and relying on the unicorn of free speech to defend them obviously seems futile today, but also did yesterday.
An old quote from Charb –
“My job is to provoke laughter or thinking with drawings — for the readers of our magazine.”
I imagine he prided himself on the ‘thinking’ rather than the ‘laughing’. These guys always say they are trying to ‘provoke though’t. But to what end ? To write for a purpose invites judgement and the 68ers hate to be judged. If you assert a principle, then at some point somebody may be able to accuse you of hypocrisy.
To us on the right the left seems very powerful and vindictive because of what it has done to the right and the old society it has swept away. Events like this remind us of actually how weak the left is. They stand for nothing, they believe in nothing, they have no inner resources whatever. They are merely oppositional. When the opposition is an old Anglican vicar, then the left has been very successful at victimising the poor old coot. However when they come up against a foe with a strong culture then it is a very different story.
The cartoonists did provoke, until the people that they provoked shot them. They didn’t really stand for anything except for nihilism and vulgar humor. There is some symbolism there — nihilism, followed by an explosion of violence, followed by a wave of sentimentality. Nothing is resolved.
We have always had nihilism and vulgarity with us, and we always will, but to place it at the pinnacle of our modern values seems appropriate to a vacuous age.
The thing about Oz and Private Eye is that they did not “run out of gas”, rather they merged into the mainstream. The editor of Oz, who died last year, became immensely rich publishing trade magazines, while Private Eye is going strong largely as a forum for politicians and journalists.
Maybe that says something about the difference between Britain and France, I’m not sure.
Fun link: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/felix-dennis-devouring-crack-cocaine-3786302
Private Eye is somewhat different to Oz or the International Times. They used to carry the liberal-baiting Auberon Waugh and the feminist ridiculing ‘Wimmin’. ‘Punching down’ does happen in its pages and Brit progs have mixed feelings about it.
“to place [nihilism and vulgarity] at the pinnacle of our modern values seems appropriate to a vacuous age”
It doesn’t seem to me that that’s an important Charlie Hebdo problem. It’s a important problem, but it’s a Piss Christ problem, not a Charlie Hebdo problem.
The left does have problems with nihilism and vulgarity, but at least humor is a natural and historically ordinary place for those things: laughing at them far less screwed up than elevating them in nonhumorous roles. You could find people to snicker or guffaw at Piss Christ in lots of societies, and likely about as many in the historically successful societies as the dysfunctional ones, I suspect. (I have not systematically studied humor in US and British history, but ISTR quite a lot of broad tasteless examples from various decades in various centuries.) I think the far more significant thing about nihilism and vulgarity in the left is not that people laugh at it, but that powerful people earnestly keep a straight face about how it is artistically important and that justifies the various taxes, grants, exhibition facilities, academic accreditations, etc. (And of course it’s not an isolated Piss Christ problem: there’s a larger pattern of debased university courses and faculty and research programs and journals and so forth.)
In a functioning society solemn self-importance can easily go too far, and the risk of spontaneously being viciously and often vulgarly mocked can be a useful control on this, and it’s not obvious to me the vulgarity there is worth worrying about. Sometimes the spontaneity isn’t enough, and an earnest program of rationalist iconoclasm along the lines of “nullius in verba” or the Scottish enlightenment is called for (IMHO, looking at historical success). But the earnest irrationalist iconoclasm of the French enlightenment and its spawn seems pretty messed up from first principles, and doesn’t have a very encouraging record of bearing good fruit.
In this case, the blasphemous cartoons are being made sacred. People light candles for saints and in memory of loved ones. It is less the existence of jokes and more their elevation to the king’s seat that is bothersome.
We see that, the French having abandoned the veneration of sainted martyrs, are instead praying to new ones who are not entirely appropriate.
The seeming nihilism of post-1968 culture stems from the Rousseau-Marxist belief that people are naturally good all-around, and only some inexplicably evil oppressors keep them down and “alienated.” Therefore, the sure path to utopia is radical critique — and nothing else, since goodness is inborn and will naturally manifest once oppression is critiqued out of existence.
So it’s not really nihilism (which in its true form is very rare IMO) as much as childish utopism translated into autistic quasi-magical rituals to banish evil. Note the implicit self-immunization: any backlash confirms oppression is real and we need more artistic rituals to banish it!
Not entirely confined to the Rousseau acolytes and the Marxists, either. It makes a little more sense if connected with the idea of destroying all the intermediaries that might prevent people from unifying with God or the utopia-concept. If we view it from this lens, the holiness of CH, especially after the martyrdom of the illustrators, makes some more sense.
Although the writing on this subject in the mainstream, such as from the pen of David Brooks, seems to be more focused on the concept of freedom of speech, the connection between that concept and that publication seems more tenuous than the one that you have brought up. Freedom of speech has a certain historical and legal context that is much harder to consider as belonging to France than it is to our Anglo heritage.