Just say ‘non’: the new French resistance
When it comes to cancel culture, the country is putting up a bigger fight than most. Colin Freeman reports
Compared with statues of Cecil Rhodes or Thomas Jefferson, the tapestries at the French Academy in Rome’s Villa Medici are not the most obvious targets for today’s culture wars. Bestowed to the academy in the 1700s, they are based on sketches from a colonial expedition to Brazil, giving a woven snapshot of the New World’s people, plants and animals.
Now, though, this set of works, known mainly just to art students, has acquired a new prominence. A petition signed by 150 leading French art figures has claimed the tapestries are being removed because they depict Europe’s imperial past.
“Nobody today approves of colonialism, but even if these tapestries were about slavery – which they are not – if you remove them, then nobody will see them, and who knows, history may make those mistakes again,” said Didier Rykner, the founder of French magazine La Tribune de l’Art, which published the petition.
“If we don’t fight this cancel culture, we will end up removing everything in museums – and after all, who among us really is pure? Some saint, maybe?”
So begins yet another bout of the increasingly bitter “war on woke” in France, a land that long thought itself above fractious US-style identity politics. Defenders of La République insist that a nation founded on liberté, égalité, fraternité needs no lecturing about minority rights or critical race theory. Others claim a conversation is long overdue, arguing that for many French citizens – particularly in its immigrant banlieues – the republic’s ideals fall well short of reality.
As in Britain and the US, some of the most cherished names in French history have come under attack. Demonstrators have denounced Napoléon Bonaparte (a statue of whom was this week proposed for removal by Rouen’s Socialist mayor), Charles de Gaulle (France’s Second World War saviour), and even Voltaire, whose beliefs were summed up by his biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire, it has been claimed, invested in firms linked to the slave trade, which was enough to get paint splashed over his statue in Paris.
Such gestures are also fuelling the rise of new far-Right figures such as Eric Zemmour, who last month declared his candidacy for April’s presidential elections. Dubbed the “French Donald Trump”, he has declared war on aggressive minority campaigners, and was photographed last month exchanging middle-finger gestures with a protester in Marseille. The image summed up the fractious national mood.
If there is one person in France whose halo risks being tarnished by this debate, it is President Emmanuel Macron. Elected on a ticket to unite Left and Right, he combines economic liberalism with Left-wing social attitudes. But in the culture wars, there is no such thing as a neutral centreground, and to critics, Macron’s globalist outlook does not make him the most obvious defender of French cultural heritage.
Certainly last year, he struck a firm tone, saying France “will not forget any of her works. She will not debunk statues.” Yet, at the same time, he called for the need to “deconstruct our history to get rid of racism”. For those who see Macron as just another paid-up member of the Davos Club elite, this is the kind of doublespeak that allows woke culture to take root in museums and campuses.
Hence the petition over the tapestries in the French Academy, which followed objections from some of the academy’s resident artists that they represented an “imperialist” artistic heritage which celebrated colonialism and slavery. That sparked a critical article in La Tribune de l’Art by Jérôme Delaplanche, the academy’s former head of art history, who views such objections as “puritanism”.
When approached by The Sunday Telegraph, the academy referred to comments that its current director, Sam Stourdzé, gave to Le Figaro last month, in which he said the tapestries were due to be removed as part of planned restoration works, but that there would be a “discussion” on their future.
Delaplanche, though, fears where that discussion will go. “The academy renovation,” he tells me, “could be an excuse to justify removing the tapestries altogether to satisfy this woke madness.”
Some of the tapestries, he added, show a diplomatic mission sent to Brazil by a Congolese monarch – “testimony to the black continent’s participation in the globalisation of the world”.
The pushback, perhaps, is no surprise. France is, after all, the home of la laïcité, the secular vision under which the population are French citizens first and members of a race, gender or religion second. It is also proud of its own intellectual traditions, long seen as a bastion against American influence.
Indeed, just as Britain’s cultural establishment sometimes seems to perpetuate cancel culture, parts of the French establishment are leading the fightback. Last year, 100 academics published an open letter in Le Monde criticising theories “transferred from North American campuses”.
In October, Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, set up Le Laboratoire de la République, a think tank dedicated to fighting cancel culture, which he blames for fuelling Donald Trump’s rise.
“A lot of anglophone intellectuals tell me if you ever find a vaccine against wokeism it is going to be French,” says Pierre Valentin, a young adviser to the Laboratoire, and author of a recent study titled “The Woke Ideology”. At just 23, Valentin is part of the millennial cohort. “I don’t actually think most people my age are woke, but they’re scared to speak out and I want to show them not to be afraid.”
Part of the Laboratoire’s remit is to support speakers who might find themselves “no-plat formed” at French universities – the only place in France, he says, where cancel culture has taken root so far.
One reason that it has failed to make many inroads, he thinks, is that France still has a powerful traditional Left, most of which is “non-woke”. “In the UK, you’ll hear Left-wing leaders like Keir Starmer saying that a woman doesn’t have to have a cervix – that’s not something you’ll hear them say here.”
Another reason is that in the wake of the 2015 Bataclan massacre and other terror attacks, the French mood on questions about multiculturalism has hardened. “Polls on questions of security, immigration and Islamism,” Valentin says, “show that French people want firmness from their leaders. They
‘If you ever find a vaccine against wokeism, it is going to be French’
don’t have much patience for being told they are Islamophobic.”
Hence Macron’s warning about “Islamist separatism” in the wake of last year’s beheading of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who showed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a free-speech lesson. More recently, the government has warned of “Islamo-Leftism” in campuses, describing it as “intellectual complicity in terrorism”.
Such comments alarm academics such as François Cusset, a professor of American studies at Paris Nanterre University. “We have 5.5 million Muslims who are perfectly assimilated – why does the government focus on the radical exception?” he asks. “This whole idea of a woke agenda is bulls---. It’s a diverse movement in defence of minority rights.”
France’s culture war may soon move beyond galleries and campuses. As one of his moves towards greater inclusivity for minorities, Macron has commissioned a historian to name 300 streets after luminaries from France’s former colonies: an acknowledgement that most streets are currently named after white Frenchmen.
The final say on name changes, however, will rest with local councils – potentially leading to numerous further rows. With the presidential race on, as well, there may be many more raised middle fingers to come.