by Wiktor Stoczkowski
Freedom always has limits. Only excess has no limits.
In France, we have recently seen conferences disrupted by the intrusion of militant groups, seminars boycotted, invitations cancelled, books torn up, and threats made to university rectors and deans. Academic circles are alarmed by this, seeing it as unacceptable attacks on their freedoms. However, academic freedom of expression has always been limited: what changes over time are the forms and objects of censorship. To better understand the particularities of the current situation, it is useful to compare it to previous regimes of academic censorship, observed here through a few typical examples. Arranged chronologically, these examples do not constitute an evolutionary sequence; they are intended to illustrate different forms of academic censorship, without seeking to give a complete representation of the historical process.
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In September 1749, the steward of the Jardin du Roi, Georges-Louis Leclerc, future Count of Buffon, published the first three volumes of his monumental Natural History. It was an immediate success: scholars may have put forward criticisms, but in the salons it was the work that one had to have read. The theses were audacious: an anonymous pamphlet was not wrong to affirm that Buffon contradicted the story of Moses, ruined religion and chased God from natural history.[1]. Institutional censorship must ensure that this kind of ideas are not disseminated. First, there is royal censorship, ensured by the management of the Librairie, responsible for granting permissions for all printings made in France. At the head of the Librairie was Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes. A supporter of freedom of thought, he would take pride in personally helping the Encyclopedists to escape the police searches that his position required him to undertake.[2]. Faced with the controversies surrounding Natural History, he would push his concern to the point of abandoning the idea of publishing a text that he had written to criticize, as a botanist that he was, Buffon's ideas. Knowing the laxity of the Royal Library, the ecclesiastical censorship exercised the right to take up contentious cases. This censorship was entrusted to the University, in this case to the Deputies and the Syndic of the Faculty of Theology of Paris. On January 15, 1751, Buffon received the following letter from them: "Sir, […] theNatural History, of which you are the author, is one of the works which have been chosen by order of the Faculty of Theology to be examined and censored, as containing principles and maxims which are not in conformity with religion […]. We have the honour to be with perfect consideration, Sir, your very humble and very obedient servants.[3]. The list of fourteen "reprehensible propositions" follows. Buffon had been aware of the risk. Six months earlier he had expressed concern about it in a letter to Abbé Le Blanc: "I hope [...] that there will be no question of putting it on the Index [...]. And in truth I have done everything to avoid deserving theological harassment, which I fear much more than the criticism of physicists or geometers."[4]. But the dispute was quickly settled, very courteously and at little cost. On March 12, Buffon sent his reply: "Gentlemen, I have received the letter that you did me the honor of writing to me, with the propositions that have been extracted from my book, and I thank you for having put me in a position to explain them in a manner that leaves no doubt or uncertainty about the rectitude of my intentions; and if you wish, Gentlemen, I will willingly publish, in the first volume of my work which will appear, the explanations that I have the honor of sending you. I am with respect, Gentlemen, your very humble and very obedient servant."[5]. Buffon gives the assurance of never having had the intention of contradicting the text of Scripture and of firmly believing all that is reported there; he declares that he abandons everything in his speculations on the formation of the Earth that could be contrary to the narration of Moses.[6]The Faculty said it was perfectly satisfied with these clarifications; the promise of seeing them published was received "with extreme joy"[7].
Buffon honoured his commitment. His explanations, as well as the letters exchanged with the Faculty of Theology, were in fact printed at the beginning of the fourth volume of theNatural History. However, the first three volumes continued to circulate without the slightest obstacle; in their numerous re-editions, published during Buffon's lifetime, none of the ideas incriminated by the censorship were ever modified. The example illustrates well the polite nature of academic censorship in the middle of the 18th century.e century: its operations are entrusted to specialized institutions; these follow formalized procedures and judge according to explicit rules of which the authors are aware, which allows them to take precautions. When censorship intervenes, it does so with civility, targeting most of the time not people, but ideas. Everything, or almost, can be said, provided that a few constraints and limitations are respected: a derisory declaration of dogmatic rectitude erases the fault. Those who do not want to comply are free to have their licentious writings printed in London, Geneva or Amsterdam, false addresses of printing houses often located in Paris. The main thing is not to sign your name and not to claim paternity. This is evidenced by the scandal surrounding The mind of Helvétius, whose royal imprimatur was revoked. It is reported that Buffon was severe with the former tax collector Helvétius, whose insolence offended against custom: it would have been better for him to sign a new contract rather than a new book, he is said to have said[8].
This liberal and often harmless nature of censorship, the attacks of which do not break any scholarly career, continued under the Restoration. In 1836, Victor Cousin published his Course in the history of philosophy taught at the Faculty of Letters during the year 1818[9]. The book places great emphasis on the autonomy of human reason, to the detriment of the truths of Revelation. What could have seemed a venial sin earned Cousin the ire of the clerical party. It was brought to the attention of the Congregation of the Index[10] and the book was placed on the list of prohibited books in 1844, where it remained for half a century later.[11]. However, this did not in any way harm Cousin's academic and political fortune: full professor at the Sorbonne, president of the jury for the philosophy aggregation, director of the École Normale Supérieure, commander of the Legion of Honor, state councilor, peer of France, academician, minister of public education. Finally, in 1854, the ultimate snub to ecclesiastical authority: Cousin published a new version of the book banned by Rome, under the title True, beautiful and good, without any of the criminal theses being retracted[12]. As in the middle of the 18th centurye century, censorship did not affect the reputation of scientists or the dissemination of their ideas.
The situation changes as the academic world becomes institutionalized and secretes its specific subcultures. The second half of the 19th centurye century is the era of the first masters of thought who elaborate their doxa, surround themselves with admiring disciples and seek to control both the teaching programs and the paths of access to academic positions. A new form of censorship then appears, internal to university institutions. It continues to present itself as the bulwark of state order and social cohesion, but it often expresses the particular interests of the academic cliques who have managed to seize the levers of power. Critics did not fail to hold it against him.
Thus, in 1881, the staff of the spiritualist school founded by Cousin was criticized for imposing dogmatic limits on the teaching of philosophy. In class, the teacher had to demonstrate the spirituality of the soul by officially recognized means, to prove free will, to seek substance and to find God on command, all this with the aim of delivering his students to spiritualism and "to doctrines patented with government guarantee."[13]. In 1884, in an even more virulent tone, Alfred Espinas extended this analysis to the competitive examination for the agrégation. The same philosophical chapel kept control of the test. The recipe for success consisted of casting one's thoughts in the mold of spiritualist metaphysics. The candidates knew this and remained on their guard in terms of doctrines.[14]. It was de rigueur to show oneself to be a good spiritualist and to condemn materialism. The candidate could not think without madness to expose before the jury the genesis of the ideas of God or of the immortality of the soul in accordance with the principles of evolution, to refute Leibniz and to glorify Hobbes, Locke or Hume. The inclinations of dissent were certainly not lacking, but when "one is twenty-three to twenty-five years old, one is a very small character before an areopagus which disposes of your future"[15]. The choice was therefore simple: either adopt the average of the jury's opinions, or fail the competition and thus condemn yourself to lifelong teaching in a college. Capitulation of conscience was the usual outcome of this confrontation with university censorship.[16]. Few dared to challenge her. The example of Hippolyte Taine continued to serve as a warning. This promising young graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, whose education, finesse, subtlety, hard work and gentleness of character were praised by all his professors, was destined to become a first-rate scholar. At the competitive examination for the agrégation in 1851, Taine showed that one essential quality was lacking in his excellence: doctrinal submission. Forgetting the lessons in circumspection that he had been given, incapable of affirming what he did not believe to be true, Taine defended Spinoza's bold propositions on morality. He "was refused, and he was charitably advised not to persist in aiming for the agrégation in philosophy."[17].
Thesis defenses were another point of passage where academic censorship was then exercised. After the test of the agrégation, candidates who aspired to become what we call today sociologists or anthropologists, had to defend their theses before juries whose composition was barely distinguishable from that of the jury of the agrégation of philosophy: they were representatives of the same clique who sat there. Any deviation from the dominant doctrine was sanctioned. This happened in 1877 to Alfred Espinas, during the defense of his thesis on animal societies[18]His rapporteur Paul Janet had reproached him for "putting forward and as if on the shield the two names as compromising as those of Messrs. Auguste Comte and Spencer[19]". It was with great difficulty that the thesis received the authorization to print, necessary for the defense to be held. Émile Durkheim was to experience similar setbacks sixteen years later, before a gathering of spiritualists where the same Janet sat. His thesis on the Division of labor social placed himself in the wake of Comte and Spencer. Without limiting himself to this boldness, Durkheim seemed to opt for an impudently materialist empiricism when he declared that moral facts are phenomena like any other and that they must be treated according to the method of the positive sciences.[20]. Spiritualism felt once again threatened: "Boutroux, to whom the thesis was dedicated - remembers a witness of the defense - could not accept without grimacing this demonstration of deterministic appearance, in which one felt something of the spirit of Taine being reborn. The ancestor Paul Janet knocked on the table and invoked God."[21]. The consequences of this transgression would be similar for Espinas and Durkheim: both would languish for a long time in provincial exile, at the University of Bordeaux. "He was excluded from Parisian chairs," lamented Durkheim's nephew, Marcel Mauss.[22]. Before them, Taine, who had been refused the agrégation, had been offered a position as a substitute at the college of Toulon: "Why not in the penal colony?", he is said to have replied when sending his resignation to the minister. But the anecdote is probably apocryphal, because in 1851 the professors did not correspond in this style with their minister.[23].
Having become more burdensome, university censorship in the second half of the 19th centurye century nevertheless remained marked by the greatest courtesy. It certainly targeted ideas, but it could now strike more severely those who had the audacity to propagate them, because the academics of the time, lacking the personal fortune of a Buffon or a Helvétius, often drew their main income from a salary paid by the State. Sanctions could reduce emoluments and slow down careers, without breaking them: Espinas and Durkheim ended up obtaining prestigious chairs at the Sorbonne, Taine was elected to the Académie française. No one was truly silenced, and even less delivered to popular vindictiveness in the press. Academic censorship continued to be exercised calmly, by clearly defined institutional bodies. However, something unprecedented was that this new censorship refused to present itself as such: the juries assured that candidates could say anything, provided they demonstrated erudition, a certain distinction, the discreet prestige of style and an elevation of soul. The reality was quite different: ideas contrary to the spiritualist doctrine whose charter Cousin had defined remained sanctioned. The 19the century is in France the original era of academic hypocrisy: while conceiving itself as the bastion of freedom of expression, the University continued to set limits to this freedom, without wanting to recognize it. The catechism to be respected still existed, only its content changed. The main difference was that this dogmatic catechism no longer wanted to assume its name: it wanted to pass itself off as the very emanation of natural reason.
In this long-striding journey, it would be useful to dwell more than I will on the first decade of the post-war period, when the Communist Party occupied an important place in French political life. Many young scholars and intellectuals then enlisted under the red banner. The philosopher Jean Desanti, believing that the new Galileos were called Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, gave in 1953 an excellent definition of communist freedom of thought: "The only truly free of all intellectuals are the communists who have merged their individual will into the will of the Party."[24]. It was in the name of freedom thus understood that Desanti praised the proletarian science of Comrade Lysenko, because the truths of the Party were la Truth. It is in the name of this truth that Georges Cogniot – graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, agrégé de lettres and deputy – declared in 1949 his admiration for Joseph Stalin, “the consummate type of scientific genius”[25]. Stalin replaced Moses, scientific Marxism supplanted Holy Scripture, and expulsion from the Party became the secular equivalent of excommunication. Opprobation was cast not only on certain ideas, but especially on the people who dared to express them. The fanaticism of those who believed themselves invested with the mission of saving humanity was expressed in the brutality of the censorship they insisted on imposing. It was no longer the polite controversies of peers who debated without ceasing to respect each other: it was the final struggle between the camp of Good and the camp of Evil. "An anticommunist is a dog" - this single, infamous phrase of Sartre sums up the climate of those years. The list is long of small acts of cowardice and great lies of which scientists and philosophers among the most admired today by a posterity forgetful of the past were guilty. Some of them have gone so far as to pride themselves on their late-recovered lucidity, as if they believed that the errors of youth were a guarantee of the infallibility of adulthood.
If this bygone era is worth remembering, it is to the extent that certain practices that it gave rise to persist in the academic world. However, academic censorship no longer exists, at least officially. How could it exist, when there is no longer a single dogma or an institution responsible for ensuring its observance? It is not that scientific texts escape all control, but that this is devolved to specialized bodies, such as the National Council of Universities (CNU), specialist commissions or professors' assemblies, which claim to base their evaluations on epistemological criteria whose function is to objectively distinguish between the innovative and the outdated, the well-founded and the unjustified, the true and the false. However, a diffuse dogma has formed in the French academic world. Calmness and lucidity often fail when discussing subjects such as human races, immigration, global warming, gender, European unification, social inequalities, the repression of delinquency, and so on. All of us – academics, journalists and politicians alike – have definitive opinions on these issues, even when we lack the technical skills to support them; our opinions are all the more clear-cut because our knowledge of the subject remains modest. We affirm that immigration is an eternal, inevitable and always beneficial phenomenon, even when we are unaware of the incredible subtleties of demographic census procedures, do not know how to define the notion of net migration and struggle to understand the distinction that INSEE makes between immigrants and foreign residents. We claim that the idea of human races has no biological basis, even though we do not read the journal Nature Genetics and ignore concepts such as single nucleotide polymorphism or satellite DNA.. We are convinced that climate change is exclusively due to human activities and that its consequences will be apocalyptic, although we have never heard of Milankovitch cycles, that the difference between the Northgrippian and the Meghalayan escapes us, and that our insights into climate change come mainly from essays on the Anthropocene, written by philosophers and sociologists. Any researcher who ventures to qualify the simplistic nature of such convictions runs the risk of academic ostracism and media lynching. Here are two typical examples, selected among many others, which date from the last decade of the 20th centurye century.
On July 13, 1993, Roger-Pol Droit launched in Le Monde a press campaign against the philosopher, political scientist and historian of ideas Pierre-André Taguieff, to whom we owe at the time reference works on the history of classical racism and on the emergence of culturalist neo-racism[26]. According to the journalist, Taguieff's mistake was to question the inconsistencies of anti-racism and to question the value of the word racism, which its overly broad meaning has ended up emptying of all meaning. Taguieff was accused of complicity with the extreme right, neo-Nazis and racists, all on the basis of two sentences taken from his publications. The main accusation was that Taguieff sought to understand the thinking of the intellectuals of the New Right, to dissect their arguments, to discuss with them, instead of "fighting" them, writes Roger-Pol Droit[27]. How should an academic combat ideas he does not share? According to Roger-Pol Droit, the academic should be content to condemn them, to pass them over in silence, to censor them.[28].
This attack, led, or at least signed, by a journalist, was accompanied in the same issue of Monde from a platform initialed by some forty eminent academics[29]. It was a "Call for vigilance". Researchers who debate with those who do not think like them, "out of scruples about freedom of expression", would be lacking in vigilance.[30]. The vigilant fighters of Truth should have no such scruples. Their mission is to hunt down the enemies of Good. In France in the early 1900s, Evil was supposed to be embodied not only in the forces of the extreme right, but also in the works of intellectuals who, lacking prudence, had "played into the hands" of the so-called neo-Nazi camp. The Vigilants made it their duty to uncover and denounce academics suspected of complacency toward the extreme right, simply because they studied it and tried to understand it instead of simply denouncing it. Pierre-André Taguieff was one of the first to be thus delivered up to public vindictiveness, presumed guilty because of his alleged proximity to the forces of Evil: the opprobrium cast upon him in the press was to weigh on his reputation for several years.
My second example concerns the demographic analysis of immigration in France. In 1999, Hervé Le Bras, director of studies at INED, published a book intended for the general public, in which he proposed to show that the demography practiced at INED was "on the way to becoming in France a means of expression of racism"[31]According to Le Bras, there exists a group of researchers "under the influence of a sort of demographic fanaticism", a dangerous group because it acts in disguise, which trivializes right-wing venoms and makes them penetrate public opinion.[32]. One of the main people responsible for this collective venom is said to be his colleague from INED Michèle Tribalat. In a work published in 1991, Tribalat and his colleagues proposed an important innovation in research on foreign immigration in France.[33]Until now, the contribution of immigration to the demography of France has been studied using the fixed notions offoreign (any person who does not have French nationality) andimmigrant (any person who lives in France without having been born there). This typological approach blurred the diachronic vision of the migratory phenomenon, because a foreigner ceases to be one when he acquires French nationality, while a considerable number of people born abroad, immigrants ex definition, were then French by birth, like the repatriates from Algeria. Michèle Tribalat and her colleagues sought to grasp the migratory contribution in its dynamic dimension over a long period of time, by quantifying the presence in France not only of the population of "immigrants", but also of the population "from immigration" (or "people of foreign origin"), on the scale of several successive generations.[34]This approach resulted in distinguishing between "older-born French" and "new French"[35]. The reference to foreign origins went against the practices of the French administration, whose principle is that the acquisition of French nationality cancels out ethnic origins in order to merge all citizens into a single national community. Tribalat's approach had, in Le Bras's eyes, the defect of distinguishing two categories that should have no legal reality. This distinction reminded him of one of the ideas of the ideology of the National Front.[36]But Le Bras found it particularly dangerous, not because it might reflect a National Front idea, but because it corresponded to the way in which many French people perceived the migratory phenomenon, refusing descendants of immigrants the status of full French people.[37]Michèle Tribalat would have been content to flatter public opinion, in order to "justify xenophobia in France"[38]. Hervé Le Bras did not contest the existence in French society of categories such as "native French" or "immigrants", defined by vernacular thought and producing real social, political and economic effects. He rebelled against an attempt to study the demographic processes that led to this categorization. Because this would amount to imposing an identity on people, Le Bras claims, when everyone should be able to adopt one according to their predilections.[39]. Moreover, it would be breaking a taboo and attacking a sacred mystery: according to Le Bras, belonging to the nation is a matter of such a mystery, because naturalization operates a transmutation of the essence of each being, sufficient to erase its origins.[40]Michèle Tribalat refused to bow to these ideological considerations and claimed the right of the demographer to scrutinize any social category: a demographic study capable of shedding light on the "reality perceived" by public opinion was for her as important as the study of reality pure and simple, that is to say, the reality perceived by scientists.[41]. For Le Bras, on the contrary, there is research that is not legitimate: "certain areas," he writes, "must be excluded from scientific investigation."[42]The only criterion of discernment that he proposes is the political consequences of scientific work. Research on ethnic origins could have been encouraged on the condition that it had aimed to introduce, as in the United States, positive discrimination.[43]. But in France it is better to prohibit them, concludes Le Bras, because of "the use that xenophobes could make of them."[44]. A limitation of freedom of scientific investigation is therefore laudable if it weakens the camp of Evil and strengthens the camp of Good.
Michèle Tribalat defended her work in the field of facts and statistical methods in vain; it was in vain that she claimed her distance from the National Front, citing the publication, the year before the attack on Le Bras, of a book co-signed with Pierre-André Taguieff, in which the two authors sounded the charge against "the Le Pen-Mégretist demagogy" and its supposedly scientific arguments.[45]. Wasted effort. The anathema cast on the demographer and the bitter rumors that accompanied it were enough to ostracize her in her professional environment: henceforth rarely mentioned by her colleagues, she ended her career isolated, without a budget, working from home.
This recent form of academic censorship, of which one could easily multiply the examples, innovates on several points. Firstly, it is deployed outside any explicit legal framework. The ideas targeted, unlike racist or xenophobic ideas, are not proscribed by law: the ideas targeted are those which are claimed to be could be used by racists and xenophobes. Secondly, this censorship is no longer exercised by institutional bodies, such as the Librairie Colbertienne, the Faculty of Theology or the aggregation juries appointed by the minister. The attacks come from individuals who proclaim themselves academic vigilantes, such as Le Bras, or from groups formed , such as the "vigilant intellectuals". Moreover, these ephemeral groups can be formed on individual initiative: the offensive against Taguieff was orchestrated by the publisher Maurice Olender and the journalist Edwy Plenel[46]The coherence of these groups is all relative. Some signatories of the platform in Le Monde in 1993 were unaware that Taguieff would also be attacked in the article by Roger-Pol Droit, which was to precede their collective platform: realizing during a meeting of vigilantes that it was only a question, "in an aggressive and obsessive manner", of Taguieff, Pierre Vidal-Naquet left the session treating his comrades as "informers and Stalinists"[47]. Third, the media mobilized by these new censors are systematically located outside the University: they are sometimes general newspapers and weeklies, sometimes commercial publishing where manuscripts are not subject to any academic evaluation. The blows are therefore dealt in the public square, in front of readers who are rarely familiar with the incriminated works and do not always have the skills necessary to evaluate the demonstrations that confront each other. Fourth, the criteria of judgment used remain vague, mixing empirical, theoretical, political, ideological and moral arguments without distinction. Certain ideas are rejected not because they are false, but because they could add fuel to the fire of Evil. On the other hand, the rhetoric of these attacks is not new and is part of the tradition of the 1950s. It unfolds with a brutality freed from any concern for decorum: insult follows in the footsteps of defamation and the trial of intent. If we are far from the polite exchange between Buffon and his censors, it is because we have moved from the register of debate to that of combat. It is no longer a question of convincing a colleague or making him recognize an error: it is a question of bringing down an enemy. The effect of a few major public lynchings, however rare, is dissuasive. They affect all academics, but particularly the young, who are waiting to find a place in the increasingly competitive academic system. No breach of the orthodoxy of the moment will be forgiven them. They quickly learn not to approach certain subjects, not to use certain words, not to conceive certain ideas. The worst censorship is not that which acts on us from without, but that which we insidiously exercise on ourselves from within. Captive thought is not exclusively a product of great totalitarian systems; it also flourishes in great democracies.
The most singular element of this type of academic censorship is the doxa that it aspires to be the bulwark of. Its first principle is the thesis according to which all traditional entities, which once seemed to enjoy a solid ontological foundation, are only social constructions, which means that they are arbitrary creations of men: ethnicity, race, nation, masculinity and femininity, climate, nature would never be independent of human action. And since all these entities now pass for human artifacts, humans are supposed to be free to deconstruct them, in order to reconstruct them at their leisure without any external constraint limiting their desire for ameliorative remaking of the world.
For at the heart of this doxa lies the problem of the remaking of the world. And it is never possible to outline the project of a radical improvement of the human world without first distinguishing its accidental properties, likely to yield to the reforming action of men, from its substantial properties, forever resistant to our desires for modification. Every battle for social reform thus begins on the terrain of ontology. The "conservative" is convinced that the laws whose determinism governs the human world are as immutable as those of gravitation: one can use them, but not modify or repeal them. The "progressive", on the contrary, thinks that reality is infinitely malleable and that men never encounter insurmountable obstacles in their desire to bend reality to the ideal they pursue.
This doxa, of which social constructivism is the expression, refuses to accept that something can be determined independently of society, that is to say independently of man. The Age of Enlightenment sought to discover natural laws, to substitute them for divine laws and to order a new society in accordance with the teachings of nature. Contemporary doxa rejects the Enlightenment project by affirming that the remaking of the world should take the opposite path: society having the faculty of freely creating both culture and nature, we must not resign ourselves to submitting to natural constraints: we should create nature according to the project that we have for society. Racism shocks us? Let us eliminate the notion of race by affirming that race, a social construct, exists only in our discourses. Social conflicts with an ethnic component concern us? Let us prohibit the use of ethnic categories in research and pray that ethnic identities will be erased by the miracle of naturalization. Sexism offends us? Let's adopt inclusive writing and "degender" toilets in the hope that this harmful social construct that is gender will disappear, deprived of its true cultural roots. Are we worried about climate change? Let's just blame civilization and indulge in verbal repentance, replacing "progress" with "sustainable development" whose miracle should preserve the environment without reducing our consumer appetites. It is no longer just society that will be repaired: it is all of nature that will emerge renewed and purified by this discursive soteriology that the current doxa promises. This is today the main issue at stake in the salvific battle between the secular camps of Good and Evil.
Academics who side with the Good claim the highest moral values. They sometimes forget that, for the scholar, truth should be the supreme value, followed immediately by the freedom to express that truth.[48]But in the dual quest in which the social sciences have been engaged since their emergence, aspiring in parallel to produce well-founded knowledge about society and to radically improve society, knowledge is often sacrificed in the name of the fantasy of a saving renovation of the human world.
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This doxa is at the heart of the recent demonstrations of university censorship that have recently hit the headlines. They are the work of minority but active fringes of student youth, sometimes allied with anarchist groups, communitarian organizations or some radical political factions. They carry out orchestrated and often violent actions, intended as much to intimidate opponents as to acquire media visibility: this is why they attack people who benefit from great notoriety, such as a former president of the Republic, the wife of a former prime minister or a very media-friendly academic. It is not certain that these attacks always target ideas. Thus, the cancellation of a conference by François Hollande at the Faculty of Law in Lille, under pressure from a group of far-left students, who ended up destroying the guest's books, targeted the former president as a symbol of the political world they despise, rather than the ideas of someone who is not really known for having any. Their goal is not so much to censor their victims, since they cannot hope to silence a François Hollande, a Sylviane Agacinski or an Alain Finkielkraut. They are content to assert their existence through spectacular stunts, while imitating a fashion imported from the United States, where 190 "disinvitation campaigns" have been launched since 2014, with the aim of preventing the arrival of speakers deemed unacceptable because of the opinions they advocate.
As for the demands, they are heterogeneous, reflecting the great ideological diversity of these groups. They all present themselves as the defenders of Good fighting against the forces of Evil. There are anarchists who dream of destroying all state order; there are extreme ecologists who advocate degrowth and a return to a rustic life; there are anti-fascists who imagine hunting down new Nazis; there are feminist fundamentalists who declare war on male oppression; there is a party of "racialized" people who demand revenge for the misdeeds of colonialism; there is a federation of Black associations which intends to make whites atone for the sins of slavery; there is a Muslim political party which proposes to fight against "Islamophobia"; there are transgender organisations which work towards the abolition of the distinction between the sexes. This broad spectrum of projects bears witness to the galloping communitarisation of French society. A common denominator nevertheless emerges, in contrast to the previous period. While at the end of the 20th centurye century the general trend was towards the erasure of ethnic, racial, religious or sexual diversity, at the beginning of the 21st centurye century these particular identities are proudly claimed by increasingly combative and virulent minorities.
This phenomenon is cause for concern since it is in the name of these fragmented identities that demands are put forward that are incompatible with freedom of academic expression. If the academic censorship of the late 20th centurye century did not arouse such concern, it is because it emanated from within institutions, carried by eminent scholars. Now it comes from groups located on the margins of academia. It is brutal, insolent and does not bother to argue. It only wants to stigmatize and exclude. It seems the very opposite of the academic ethos.
Yet, it is we who have trained this youth who aspire to censor their elders in our schools and universities. They have not acquired their radical positions through heredity: they are part of the models that previous generations have instilled in them. They have developed their ideologies from ideas gleaned from social science studies. This youth has been raised to admire the heroic myth of May 1968, whose fable seeks to conceal the anti-democratic fury. What is more, their enthusiasm is supported and encouraged by aging academics who began their careers in far-left organizations, then lulled by the dream of "direct action," and ended up in the cohort of CNRS or university civil servants, without, however, abandoning their childish hatred of the "system," hatred of the world as it is, in the name of a dreamed world as it should be.
The social sciences bear a heavy share of responsibility for the fanaticization of these young people who are now turning against them and against the State. Indeed, what is the vision of the world that the social sciences have transmitted to these young people, with the support of the media and the educational institution? It is a world based on incessant conflicts, where the rich exploit the poor, where the dominant crush the dominated, where power monitors citizens, where the forces of law and order are only an instrument of oppression and repression in the hands of the powerful. We remember Pierre Bourdieu, in a film by Pierre Carles, confronted with the complaints of young descendants of Maghrebi immigrants, who expressed their frustrations: a recognized critic of the republican school, the sociologist did not recommend that they educate themselves to obtain diplomas, nor to learn useful trades, nor to integrate into society which is certainly imperfect, but where everyone should seek their place. He pointed out to their vindictiveness "those who must be fought", and advised them to form an "immigrant movement", to revolt, with method and organisation, even if it meant using violence: "...we need a social movement, he said, which can burn cars, but with an objective"[49]. This is an example, one among many others, of the praise of violent radicalization for which the social sciences have collectively made themselves responsible, thus signing their civic and moral resignation. In their haste to remake society and repair injustices, real or imaginary, they have lost all sense of proportion. Carried by the chimera of repairing the defective world, they have broken contact with the real world.
The prophetic tone and the demeanor of the omniscient savior are now more valued than the humility of the true researcher who agrees to publicly acknowledge the limits of his knowledge. The fanatic fringe of youth, who today tear up books instead of reading them, has fed on our errors. It only imitates the postures of our own radicalism, pushing them to the point of caricature. And like its masters, this youth despises truth and freedom of expression, because it does not seek to know the world; it aspires only to revolutionize it. This is the main message it has retained from our lessons. But it is we who first betrayed our vocation, when we put commitment above rationality and truth below ideological correctness.
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The cohesion of any society is based on the foundation of shared ideas and values. Every society disapproves of ideas and values that threaten this common foundation. This is a normal phenomenon. However, it is desirable that society give a polite form to the legitimate censorship that it intends to exercise. It is good that censorship operates within a precise legal framework. It is good that it is entrusted to bodies authorized and supervised by law. It is good that censorship acts in accordance with duly explained criteria. It is good that it is always reasoned, like any other legal act. It is good that it targets ideas and not people. And it is good that its action is marked by a certain civility, because propriety, which does not exclude fair firmness, is all the more precious when it is observed not only with allies, but also with adversaries.
Recent forms of censorship are worrying not because they limit freedom of expression, but because they do not meet any of the characteristics of policed censorship. Even more worrying is the inability of our society to combat these savage forms of censorship and to oppose them, by means of policed censorship, with a final refusal.
Wiktor Stoczkowski
Director of Studies at EHESS
stoczkowski (a) ehess.fr
