Caroline Monnot, the newspaper’s Directrice de la rédaction (managing editor) said: “This drawing can indeed by interpreted as a minimisation of the seriousness of incestuous acts and makes inappropriate reference both to the victims and to transgender people.”
Mr Gorce rejects this reading of his cartoon as absurd. “It was an ironical comment (on those who asked) if this was truly incest (if a step-father was involved) as if that in some way reduced the offence,” he told the magazine Le Point. “I was pointing out that modern family structures might muddle the concept of incest… but paedocriminality remains indisputably a crime.”
“Laughter is a defence. It is a critical commentary. It’s never a mockery or humiliation.”
Fluidity of gender is one thing. Fluidity of commitment to press freedom on the part of a great newspaper like Le Monde is another. If it’s permissible in the name of free speech to offend Muslims (even though that was not the intention of the Charlie cartoons) is it not permissible to offend transgender people (even though that was not Gore’s intention)? Is incest — long a taboo subject in France, as elsewhere — completely off-limits for satire or humour?
The French commentariat has been deeply divided on the subject. Caroline Fourrest is a columnist and film-maker who has often eloquently attacked the US media for misunderstanding France’s commitments to secularity and freedom of speech. Fourrest has been equally eloquent this week in defending Mr Gorce and his politically incorrect penguins.
“It is perfectly reasonable not to like this drawing,” she tweeted. “But there is no reason for a torrent of insults…. We live in an epoch in which everything has become a cause for instance offence… This will end up by persuading us that nothing is terrible because we are told that everything is terrible.”
Mr Gorce, who considers himself Left-wing, has often bruised leftist or anti-establishment sensibilities in the past. During the 2018-19 gilets jaunes rebellion in rural and suburban France, he drew a group of penguins wearing yellow vests who announced: “We are asking for stuff but don’t try to trick us by asking what.”
In his interview with Le Point (for which he also works), Gorce said: “There are people who don’t want to understand anything but prefer to devote themselves entirely to their own indignation… They have an ideological agenda and want to stir up the masses rather than laugh or think because they think that will advance their cause.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that this has become a kind of inquisition… A religious tribunal which decides whether things are decent or not. I thought we had got rid of that thanks to our secular state… which guarantees freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.”
Le Monde’s editor, Jérôme Fenoglio, replied in a statement that the newspaper believed that “freedom of the press is a vital element of our democracy” and “indivisible”. However, freedom also meant “responsibility”, and this included recognising the newspaper’s “error” in publishing a drawing “which could be read as a minimisation of the gravity of incest, at a time when society is just facing up to its extent”.
Sources within Le Monde say that its staff have been deeply divided on the apology. Some say that the cartoon was clumsy at best and open to misinterpretation; others that, seen in the context of Gorce’s other work, it was obvious that the cartoon intended to mock the contorted arguments of France’s great and good, not to mock transgender people or victims of incest.
My own view? The incident is complicated. I found the cartoon subtle and funny. I can see why others misinterpreted it. But I believe that Le Monde made a mistake.
After 12 people were killed in the Islamist terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015, Le Monde wrote in an editorial: “They died for our freedom. They died for a few cartoons. Through them, the target was free speech… The killers were aiming at the freedom to inform and to be informed, to debate, criticise, understand, persuade, the free spirit, the necessary and vital audacity of freedom.”
The newspaper — and France as a whole — was absolutely right to defend the Hebdo Mohammed cartoons, even though some of them were unfunny and poorly drawn. Le Monde should also have defended Gorce’s penguins, which are usually wise and witty and beautifully drawn in a minimalist way. If the joke failed on this occasion, the paper should at least have given Xavier Gorce an opportunity to explain himself.
Freedom, especially in satire, means freedom to push the boundaries of taste. To quote Le Monde’s own 2015 Charlie Hebdo editorial back at them, Gorce’s penguins embody “the free spirit, the necessary and vital audacity of freedom”.
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