Tribune published on December 6, 2022 in Le Figaro
On Tuesday, November 29, the conference on "Inclusive writing, the enemy of universalist feminism" that I was invited to give at the Espace Mendès France in Poitiers - a center for scientific culture and societal debates - was disrupted by about twenty agitators, who made noise (shouting, stamping their feet and hands, insults, etc.) in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to speak. The administrator of the place asked them either to be quiet to listen and then discuss calmly, or to leave, so they persisted in the hullabaloo. He then announced that he was calling the police, after which they left the room. The conference was then able to take place under normal conditions, followed by a discussion with the audience, some of whom disagreed with my remarks but were willing to debate calmly.
In this (small) affair, it is necessary to underline the exemplary attitude of the director, whose insight and firmness should be commended: he resisted the pressure received that very morning from the town hall (EELV) to cancel the conference; he called the police when he realized that the conference could not be held without outside intervention; and the next day he filed a complaint for damage, the door of the establishment having been vandalized during the night.
The paradox in this case is that it is a private law association, whereas, faced with the same problems, several public institutions and even municipalities have chosen, on the contrary, to not enforce the law. Thus, on November 20, the Paris Centre city hall cancelled a WIZO meeting on the grounds that Caroline Eliacheff, a renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was speaking there on "The Making of the Transgender Child". Three days before, the police did not intervene to allow her to give the lecture planned as part of the Cité Philo festival in Lille, while the same hullabaloo as in Poitiers was organised by activists accusing her of "transphobia". And in June, it was the University of Geneva that gave up on filing a complaint against the activists who prevented the lecture by the philosopher Eric Marty, accused of "homophobia" and "transphobia" because of the analyses developed in his book Modern Sex.
We can also mention the University of Bordeaux, which in October 2019 cancelled a conference by Sylviane Agacinski, threatened by activists unhappy with her positions against surrogacy (a practice banned in France); the presidency of the Sorbonne, which took a similar decision against training on the prevention of radicalisation entrusted to Mohamed Sifaoui (author of How the Muslim Brotherhood wants to infiltrate France), deemed "problematic" by the Paris-I inter-union, with students even denouncing "Islamophobic attacks"; still at the Sorbonne, in March 2019, the cancellation of a performance of Suppliants by Aeschylus, in a production by Professor Philippe Brunet, under pressure from supposedly anti-racist groups arguing that the masks worn by the actors were part of blackface ; or again, in November 2018, the University of Limoges, which pronounced the exclusion of sociologist Stéphane Dorin from its laboratory for having expressed his opposition to the invitation made to activist Houria Bouteldja, spokesperson for the party of the Indigènes de la République (PIR), to hold a seminar there (the courts then ordered the university to reinstate the teacher-researcher).
This list illustrates two phenomena that every democracy should be concerned about. The first is the prevalence of a new culture of censorship (cancel culture) very popular on American campuses, in connection with the movement Woke. With the good conscience that comes from the feeling of fighting against discrimination, these "activists" consider themselves entitled to prohibit any speech that does not conform to their convictions, and to cast opprobrium on their adversaries via pack hunts facilitated by the power of social networks - which everything suggests are their only source of information. Thus they dodge any questioning of their methods even though they are based on a fascist propensity to impose their ideas by force, in contempt of these fundamental rights of democratic life that are freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
But to this first phenomenon, worrying in itself, is added a second, more serious one: it is the tendency of certain institutional leaders and even elected officials to shirk their responsibilities, by giving in to the first injunction without questioning its legitimacy. Thus, the Interministerial Delegation for the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-LGBT hatred published a press release in July accusing the specialists gathered in the Little Mermaid Observatory – who advocate caution and prior psychological support for minors expressing the wish to change sex – of promoting “conversion therapies”. Without even having heard the arguments of Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson, heads of this Observatory, the Dilcrah took up the activists’ argument, quickly sticking the infamous label of “transphobe” on anyone opposing the quasi-sectarian pressures of trans associations. In all these cases, not only do the institutions not allow the victims of these slanders to defend themselves, but they support their slanderers by giving in to their demands.
Is it a question of lack of reflection, cowardice, opportunism or, more trivially, impotence due to the aberrant organization of university councils? The fact remains that our institutions behave as objective accomplices of radicalized activists, and make their strength while they are very few in number. What has happened to us for it to be the director of a small associative structure who sets an example of behavior consistent with democracy by enforcing the preamble to the Constitution: "The law guarantees the pluralist expressions of opinions"?
