Christopher Caldwell: Politically correct intolerance in France
[The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.]
In the waning days of the French suburban riots in November, the correspondent of De Volkskrant, the Dutch daily, questioned a French criminologist about the cultural assumptions of French policymakers and the public. "In comparison to the Netherlands," she noted, "France is still a model of political correctness. Might not the extent of its problems be due to an inability to give them a name?"
This is a different view of political correctness than the one that existed a decade and a half ago, when the term was first coined. Back then, "PC" seemed like a mere cultural curiosity, a stilted and slightly ridiculous system of exaggerated formality about social differences that had started in corners of the American university system and spread from there. In short, it was a modern kind of pomposity. But today, it has come to look like a much more serious matter: not a protocol for dealing with groups in a sensitive way, but an ideology in itself, even a governing model.
There are actually two kinds of political correctness - a sentimental kind and an authoritarian kind. Unsurprisingly, the latter advances itself in the name of the former. This is a lesson of the "Finkielkraut affair", which has raged in France since the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut gave an interview to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, three weeks ago. Mr Finkielkraut dissented from the consensus view of the riots that had prevailed in the French media. According to that consensus, the riots were an expression of "rebellion" against French racism and exclusion.
The problem is that that is not always the way the rioters themselves described it. Mr Finkielkraut noted that most of the angry youths were blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. In their rap lyrics and their slogans against France and Frenchness, many had tried to cast their deeds in ethno-religious terms. "Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany," he added. "Right away, everyone would have said: 'Fascism won't be tolerated.' "...
Mr Finkielkraut's views were independent but hardly incendiary. Yet, when Le Monde excerpted the Haaretz interview in an article in late November, the result was a national campaign of denunciation. The Nouvel Observateur magazine called him a "neo-reactionary". A letter to the editor of the daily Liberation attacked him as "belonging to that very French tradition of writers who, sunk in deep despair, abandon humanistic ideals". Another compared him to a functionary of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, who had been suspended from his professorial job ("in an exemplary and justified fashion") for expressing doubts about historians' account of the Holocaust....
What made the Finkielkraut affair so sinister to defenders of free speech was its legal aspect. On top of the press controversy, the French Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples (MRAP) threatened to file suit against Mr Finkielkraut under laws forbidding incitement to race hatred. ...
In the waning days of the French suburban riots in November, the correspondent of De Volkskrant, the Dutch daily, questioned a French criminologist about the cultural assumptions of French policymakers and the public. "In comparison to the Netherlands," she noted, "France is still a model of political correctness. Might not the extent of its problems be due to an inability to give them a name?"
This is a different view of political correctness than the one that existed a decade and a half ago, when the term was first coined. Back then, "PC" seemed like a mere cultural curiosity, a stilted and slightly ridiculous system of exaggerated formality about social differences that had started in corners of the American university system and spread from there. In short, it was a modern kind of pomposity. But today, it has come to look like a much more serious matter: not a protocol for dealing with groups in a sensitive way, but an ideology in itself, even a governing model.
There are actually two kinds of political correctness - a sentimental kind and an authoritarian kind. Unsurprisingly, the latter advances itself in the name of the former. This is a lesson of the "Finkielkraut affair", which has raged in France since the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut gave an interview to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, three weeks ago. Mr Finkielkraut dissented from the consensus view of the riots that had prevailed in the French media. According to that consensus, the riots were an expression of "rebellion" against French racism and exclusion.
The problem is that that is not always the way the rioters themselves described it. Mr Finkielkraut noted that most of the angry youths were blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. In their rap lyrics and their slogans against France and Frenchness, many had tried to cast their deeds in ethno-religious terms. "Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany," he added. "Right away, everyone would have said: 'Fascism won't be tolerated.' "...
Mr Finkielkraut's views were independent but hardly incendiary. Yet, when Le Monde excerpted the Haaretz interview in an article in late November, the result was a national campaign of denunciation. The Nouvel Observateur magazine called him a "neo-reactionary". A letter to the editor of the daily Liberation attacked him as "belonging to that very French tradition of writers who, sunk in deep despair, abandon humanistic ideals". Another compared him to a functionary of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, who had been suspended from his professorial job ("in an exemplary and justified fashion") for expressing doubts about historians' account of the Holocaust....
What made the Finkielkraut affair so sinister to defenders of free speech was its legal aspect. On top of the press controversy, the French Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples (MRAP) threatened to file suit against Mr Finkielkraut under laws forbidding incitement to race hatred. ...