By endorsing the fight against Islamism as the sole torch, Charlie would have fallen into the serious and dominant camp, regrets media specialist Daniel Schneidermann.
“Has the fight for the right to make people laugh taken precedence over the simple desire to make people laugh?” This is one of the many questions that the evolution of Charlie Hebdo to journalist Daniel Schneidermann. He exposes them in an essay whose title alone sums up the drift he denounces, Charlism. The founder of the show (and the site) Freeze frames is nostalgic for the time when the satirical newspaper targeted “the military, the priests, the police, the hunters, the billionaires, the rich in general, all these visual warts of the West” in a joyous surge of which were never absent is self-deprecation and tenderness. But “how to remain anti-militarist, when it is the army which defends your right to be so? How can you remain anti-cop, when it’s the police who protect you in your daily life?” asks the author.
The adolescent joy of the origins was succeeded, according to him, by charlism, “the perversion of the mind Charlie» born in the aftermath of the attack. However, its beginnings are older. September 11 begins this great shift when Charlie “stands at the forefront of the camp of the civilized against the barbarian danger”. It deepens when Philippe Val takes over its management and the “right to blasphemy” goes from watchword among others to main. “It’s about bringing down a carpet of bombs on the Islamists, and them alone, with some collateral damage on the side of the mass of Muslims in general, but we get nothing for nothing,” judges Daniel Schneidermann. Result: by taking the fight against Islamism as our only compass, Charlie Hebdo necessarily joins the camp of the dominant. “Born in support of civilized Westerners against barbarians everywhere else, the Charlie de Val thereby found himself irresistibly drawn to the side of the dominants, sat down at their table, and discovered that the cushions were soft», asserts the theorist of charlism.
-“Has the fight for the right to make people laugh taken precedence over the simple desire to make people laugh?”
Thus “the Charlists have let all the figures of today’s oppression slip through the cracks, economic and political oppression, ideological bludgeoning…”. The weekly’s desertion of the fight against climate change and against advertising alienation would today be the most striking proof of this, alongside its indifference to the fate of the Palestinians since the start of the war in Gaza. Raised to this intensity, the anti-Islamist fight would be blind. Faced with the massacre in Gaza, “what does Charlie?». “What do Reiser, Cabu, Wolinski, Gébé say? What does Charb say who, in his drawings, his editorials, his reports, has never wavered in his support for the Palestinians, and in the denunciation of apartheid in the West Bank? Where are their drawings? Where are their laughter of rage and despair?” asks Daniel Schneidermann. Ten years later, is it also time for introspection?
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