The death toll from yesterday’s shootings in Paris stands at twelve. Today has brought word of an armed holdup at a gas station, probably carried out by the escaped gunmen. Let us hope they are caught before any further harm is inflicted. And there has been another incident: a female police officer was shot dead on Thursday, in the southern Parisian suburb of Montrouge. No link has been established with Wednesday’s attack, but who knows what deeds arise, and what feelings are ignited, when a public mood is as angered and volatile as this one?
Amid such tragedies, it may seem perverse, not to say tasteless, to talk of comedy. But we need to bear in mind that Charlie Hebdo, the target of the murders in Paris, is a satirical magazine. Its raison d’être was to make people laugh. You may disagree, saying that its more substantial mission was to provoke, to outrage, and to scold unreason and prejudice, bringing institutions to account or into disrepute—but many publications do that with an air of frowning solemnity. If Charlie Hebdo sought the truth, it did so by treading the path of the grotesque, littering the ground with jokes, often cheap and silly ones, as it passed along. That path led to catastrophe. Members of staff were exterminated for making fun.
Were they sometimes irresponsible? Yes. Is there not something juvenile, or at least eternally adolescent, about men and women who continue to sneer at power and to snicker at the dignified proceedings of high office long after the rest of us, not without regret, have accepted the rites of dullness as the way of the world? Of course. Freedom of speech, that noblest of abstractions, can easily coarsen and shrink into freedom of snort. Nonetheless, a certain rakish splendor hangs over those who refuse to calm down, shut up, or grow up. To claim, as Tony Barber, the Europe editor of the Financial Times, did in an opinion piece yesterday, that “some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo,” is to grasp the wrong end of the stick. One of the joys—more often than not, a joyful embarrassment—of a democracy is that it allows time and room for people who find the whole lark of maturing, whether in politics or in personal conduct, to be overrated. Common nonsense has its place and purpose, too. Try sitting children down in front of the scene in “Duck Soup” in which Harpo amputates the tailcoat of an ambassador with large scissors, or the one where he rolls up his pants to paddle in lemonade, and observe the kids’ amazement and their pangs of fellow-feeling at realizing that one adult, at least, has chosen to remain in their camp. It’s not enough, as the folks at Charlie Hebdo knew, to break the rules of the game; you have to pick another game and play it to the hilt.
To find that loose and ludic habit offensive is, needless to say, itself a basic right. The Catholic Church was quite justified in abhorring the magazine’s irregular lampoons—a cartoon of the previous Pope, for instance, holding a condom over his head as though it were a Communion wafer. What the Vatican did not do, however, was dispatch or inspire a couple of deluded souls to enter the offices of its detractors and assassinate them, and Rome’s condemnation of Wednesday’s events was notably swift and severe. To disagree is not to destroy: that is a pact of understanding, brought to birth by the Enlightenment, to which all sides in this terrible saga, bar the assailants, feel honor-bound to subscribe. Only rarely, nowadays, are books banned; more seldom still are they burned, and the sight of flaming pages, as with “The Satanic Verses,” means trouble flaring ahead.
France has been here before, on countless occasions. “On the Mind,” for instance, a work of philosophy by Claude Helvétius, published in 1758, was deemed offensive by the authorities (regal, clerical, and parliamentary) and put to the torch. When Voltaire finally got round to reading it, he remarked, Bien du bruit pour une omelette (“A lot of noise about an omelette”). Not for a second was he suggesting that the omelette should not be served, preferably with a well-dressed side salad; he simply couldn’t understand why it had caused, or deserved, such an almighty fuss. And so it is with Charlie Hebdo: nobody could accuse the paper of being philosophical, even in Paris, but it is the very definition of an omelette—dished up hot and consumed in haste. The notion that it might be worth killing for is, to an extent, the blackest and bitterest fuss that it has ever engendered. But could it be worth dying for?
That was the view of its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, who was one of the people executed yesterday. In 2011, when the magazine was firebombed in the wake of an edition that was named “Charia Hebdo” (a play on the French word for “Sharia”), Charbonnier told a television interviewer: “I’d rather die than live like a rat.” To scurry out of sight and take shelter underground, or under cover of trash, is no life at all, especially if your most heinous crime is to commit comedy. As an educated Frenchman, Charbonnier would have read his Baudelaire and his Bergson—just two of the high-ranking French authors who have taken it upon themselves to theorize about the comic spirit. That is, in itself, an unmistakably Gallic enterprise; you cannot imagine Dickens spending—or, as he would regard it, wasting—an entire book on the sombre discussion of laughter when he could be busy eliciting it, line by line, in a novel. Baudelaire, however, in his great essay of 1855, “On the Essence of Laughter,” pried into the attitudes that he saw enshrined in our will to laugh—into our superiority over one another, and over nature. Our propensity to mock, he thought, was “Satanic,” of “damnable origin,” as impossible to imagine in paradise as the fall of our tears.
If Baudelaire leaves you wondering, quietly, whether the fall of man was set in motion by a dropped banana skin, then Bergson’s offering, entitled simply “Laughter,” ushers us toward a more remedial definition. The book was published in 1900, on the hinge between two centuries, both of them stacked with horrors that would seem to banish any hint of amusement, yet Bergson made it his business to pay homage to “the comic spirit” as an unquenchable part of our being. “We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life.” And why? Because our earnestness and our vanity beg for nothing less; only comedy can dissolve them. What Bergson deplores is encrustation—the way in which we dry and stiffen up, taking ourselves, our poses, and our beliefs so seriously that they sap us of pliability, poise, and goodwill. And so to this:
We are very close, here, to the terrors of Wednesday. People with many ideas, plus an ingrained ability to skip from one to the next, or to pitch one thought against another, were slaughtered by people with only one idea. The first group ridiculed the second, and the second group despised and resented the first, in part because that ridicule was performed with a light touch—with a sketch and a caption, and little else. Bergson again: “Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it.” For a few appalling minutes, the vengeance was turned around, and wielded against the laughers. Al Qaeda, smarting with humiliation, took the liberty of ending their lives, just to quash a handful of jokes. And that is no liberty at all.
