It is very easy to say that one supports freedom of speech, and that one wishes to protect liberty, equality and fraternity. But the question must arise: whose freedom of speech? Whose liberty? Whose equality? Whose fraternity? Just how much access to the public sphere is available in France to the young, often very poor, often unemployed French North African community? Like many great cities (London, New York), Paris has undergone various historical stages of reconstruction and gentrification – from the seventeenth century, to Hausmann’s destruction of the old mediaeval core in the 1860s, to the destruction of Les Halles in the 1970s, up to the present day. It is very easy to see that the city within the péripherique is, except for its northeastern rim, increasingly middle class or haut bourgeois and white – this despite the rising population of African and Arab origins living in the poor banlieues, for whom the prospect of living in ‘old Paris’ and partaking of its gilded culture is a distant fantasy. The divisions of Paris show that there is a class and ethnic context to the purported ‘freedom’ of Charlie Hebdo to publish its offensive cartoons, and to the purported ‘freedom’ of Muslims to reply.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:55:58 +0000
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