Freedom of speech in France and the call for ‘higher order’ leadership
I have watched with sadness the events of these past weeks in my adopted home country, concerning the question over France’s defense of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and their role in stoking the anger of Muslim’s around the world.
I have lived in France for 10 years and have struggled to reconcile this defense of free speech with what, I believe, are ‘higher order principles’ that should guide our everyday actions in both the private and public domain. I believe that insulting another person’s religious beliefs is categorically wrong and should never be equated with the defense of freedom of speech. Our democracies were founded on a belief in the dignity of each individual to live a life free of oppressive thought and action, with a tolerance and respect for each individual’s choices as to how they lived their lives. Indeed, it is my understanding that this is the principle of ‘laicité’ that informs the bedrock of France’s public life. Yet, so much of the conversation in recent years — and we can see this being borne out with the struggles so many other countries are facing too — is a refusal to acknowledge the importance of these ‘higher order principles’ to the foundation of our democratic systems. As I understand it, the French revolutionaries who founded the modern French republic, were seeking a larger and more profound sense of justice, respect and tolerance than freedom of speech in its crudest form. It was the demand for the dignity of man that caused so many people to risk their lives in what can only have been a very tumultuous period of French history, and one that left such a profound legacy on the establishment of democracy and human rights across the world. France should be justly proud of its role in reminding the world of those inalienable rights.
But what saddens me is to witness how those ideas have become corrupted over time. In my experience, France suffers from its own form of ‘extremism’ — an inability to confidently reconcile the desirable separation of religion and government with respect and tolerance for other cultures. Of all the countries I have lived in, I think France struggles the most with it’s conception of ‘the other’. There is additionally an ‘all or nothing’ mentality that casts out any possibility of defending freedom of speech with a call for individuals to consider their own responsibilities towards how we treat other people and upholding the social contract in our everyday actions too. To my mind, it smacks of a self-serving sense of superiority and a colonial mindset that should have disappeared decades, if not centuries, ago. It is something I struggle with, daily, whilst living here and, in fact, is motivating me to set up my own school so that I can raise my half-French daughters to truly understand the depth of what those beautiful French values of ‘liberty, equality, brotherhood’ — ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’, plastered across every town hall in the land — should mean in practical action. I have no desire for them to enter the current education system as it is now if they are going to be taught what, to me, are morally reprehensible values about how we treat other people’s religious or cultural beliefs.
To defend freedom of speech is important and murder is always, categorically, wrong. And my heart goes out to Samuel Paty’s family and all those who have lost their lives in recent weeks. These awful acts should never have happened.
Our world, not just France, is at a dangerous inflection point if our human systems of government are not based on a set of ‘higher order principles’, that are the foundation of our democracies and must be literally defended with our lives. The truly great leaders that our world has been blessed with, the likes of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela etc, understood that ‘greatness’ stemmed from something deeper and more profound than our human systems allowed for. They understood that we can never truly be free until we release ourselves and others from the mental and spiritual aspects of oppression, not just the human ones. We must also continue to remember that our rights come with a corresponding acknowledgement of our responsibilities as individuals in building a harmonious society and to ‘dig deeper’ in our own expression of higher order principles of leadership that we can each express. It is true that it is likely inadvisable to try to ‘police’ journalism and define who is allowed to say what. But it is equally true that just because we have the freedom to say something offensive, doesn’t mean that we should. President Macron is just as capable of calling for tolerance of other’s beliefs as he is of defending free speech in his country and the absence of one in the vociferous presence of the other only serves to deepen the polarisation within our societies. We need only look to recent times in America, to see what happens when moral corruption sets into our societies and our leadership. This crowding out of a more nuanced debate on this — and a desire to build societies based on love and respect for others — seems to me equally risky of freedom of speech and the defense of the ‘higher order principles’ that should define our democracies in the first place.
Caroline Watson is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, founder of The Centre for the Arts and Global Leadership, and a disruptive thinker, speaker and writer on global governance and leadership.
