Charlie Hebdo Is Heir to the French Tradition of Religious Mockery - WSJ

The Paris magazine targeted by terrorists was part of a radically irreverent school of secular thought that goes back centuries.

The satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was the conscious heir to a French intellectual tradition with a long history: radical anticlericalism.

Before the Charlie Hebdo era (the magazine dates from the late 1960s), France’s most influential anticlerical thinkers trained their fire on Catholicism—for centuries the country’s state religion. As a rule, however, these individuals objected not so much to precise points of religious doctrine as to the fanaticism, ignorance and persecution that, in their view, tended to accompany “true faith.” The opponents of doctrinaire Catholicism used caricature, irony and humorous blasphemy—thus setting the tone for Charlie Hebdo’s later fight with  jihadist Islam.

Anticlerical French thought traces its origins to rambunctious early Catholic practices such as Carnival, in which Christian morality was temporarily and gleefully suspended, as well as to Renaissance literary representations of priests as importunate louts. In François Rabelais’s “Gargantua” (1534), the eponymous hero rails against monks because they “neither plow, like the peasant, nor heal the sick, like the doctor” but instead “harass the whole neighborhood by rattling their church-bells” and mumbling “countless legends and psalms they don’t even understand.”

Anticlericalism reached its apogee during the Enlightenment. Brandishing finely honed logic and wicked humor, the philosophesgleefully mocked what they saw as the inconsistencies and absurdities of Church dogma. Voltaire excelled at this technique. In his novella “L’Ingénu” (1767), a gaggle of small-town priests and parishioners decides to convert an Amerindian “savage”—only to see their plan go comically awry when the newcomer makes a quick study of the Bible and then demands that they comply with all of its directives, from circumcision (generally dismissed by Voltaire’s contemporaries as a “Jewish” practice) to baptism in a river (rather than at a baptismal font).

In Voltaire’s satirical “Dictionnaire Philosophique” (1764), he imagines a theological debate between a philosophe and a religious zealot. When the former carries a point by citing ecclesiastical authorities, his opponent replies, “Come, now. Neither they nor God will stop us from burning you alive; that’s the punishment for…philosophers who don’t share our opinions.” Voltaire himself escaped destruction by fire, but the Church condemned his “Dictionnaire” and other works to the flames.

In Voltaire’s satirical “Dictionnaire Philosophique” (1764), he imagines a theological debate between a philosophe and a religious zealot. When the former carries a point by citing ecclesiastical authorities, his opponent replies, “Come, now. Neither they nor God will stop us from burning you alive; that’s the punishment for…philosophers who don’t share our opinions.” Voltaire himself escaped destruction by fire, but the Church condemned his “Dictionnaire” and other works to the flames.  Read More at WSJ

Charlie Hebdo Is Heir to French Tradition of Religious Mockery