INTERVIEW – For historian Laurent Bihl, the cartoonists' fight has now changed: they must now fight against ambient indifference and no longer against legislative censorship.
Ten years after the killing of Charlie Hebdothe fight of cartoonists has changed: they must now fight against ambient indifference and no longer against legislative censorship, notes for AFP Laurent Bihl, specialist in satire at the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne.
Is there a before and after the attack on Charlie Hebdo ?
Laurent BIHL. – Yes and this before/after is further deepened by the Samuel Paty affair, five years later. The fear is obvious. But today, it is no longer a tightening of the law that leads to self-censorship by cartoonists. The pressure comes from dotted vindictiveness on social networks and the terrorist threat, not only in France. Since 2015, instead of spaces opening up, spaces have closed. THE New York Times announced that it would stop publishing satires on July 1, 2019. “Les Guignols de l’info” (Canal+ show) disappeared in June 2018, three years after Charlie, without anyone questioning it.
How can we explain this indifference and the fact that certain drawings are more shocking today?
Drawing is a seemingly simple mode of expression but its reception is extremely complex. The designer never completely controls his motif. When the satirical image appeared in the era of newsstands and after the law of July 29, 1881 (on freedom of the press), it was a shock. Power and the leagues of virtue put pressure, morally and legally, on the cartoonists.
We find this shock again with the explosion of social networks. As the Swiss designer Chappatte says, “ the design is local and the image is global “. A satirical newspaper is bought by someone who understands this type of humor. But, transported via the internet thousands of kilometers away, the shock is necessarily different. And these are often places where local satirical production is impossible.
Is there less tolerance for the caricature of religions as our times become more secularized?
There is an evolution on the very idea of tolerance. In the past, respect for the general interest had led to an idea of freedom of expression where one could say almost anything, to show precisely that nothing was sacred, even if legal rules remained. Today, we no longer respect a principle, but our neighbor. The opponents of caricature do not understand that the culture of laughter necessarily ends up laughing with your neighbor and not at him. Whereas with the opposite and the culture of prohibition, we end up denouncing it anonymously on the internet.
The attack on signed caricatures has as a corollary the tsunami of doctored or unsigned images on this trash bin of our collective unconscious that the Internet has become. The nobility of the caricature is that it comes forward unmasked.
Laughter, a political weapon, can also be at the service of those in power…
This is obvious and the bitter memory of anti-Semitic campaigns or the humor inscribed in the colonial culture of yesteryear reminds us of this. But nothing justifies violence. Relations of domination are fought by issuing counter-caricatures, by debating or by taking legal action. In terms of freedom of expression, there is another problem on the economic level, with media which are very rich and to which we cannot respond as equals because their strength is so great. But the satirical media that we are talking about are for the most part very fragile economically and this is the other main threat, before being terrorist, which weighs on small titles like Siné Hebdo, Fakir, The Letter to Lulu (Nantes satirical media)…
Is the caricature an anti-image?
More of an offbeat look. The violence of the lines of the caricatures, even funny ones, makes them frozen images at the moment when the images follow one another so quickly that they cancel each other out. There are hundreds of corpses of drowned children like that of little Aylan Kurdi (a 3-year-old Syrian boy found dead in 2015 on a beach in Turkey, Editor's note), who remain on the threshold of the television news. Showing him stranded in front of a McDonald's advert is to question what is forcing these new wretches to leave and from whom we turn our gaze away. And that the drawing could have shocked more (or as much) as the initial photograph poses a real collective problem. The caricature is a social eye, its role is to fight against indifference.
