Saturday, July 27, the day after the opening ceremony of the 33rd Summer Olympics in Paris. The overwhelming majority of French people are proudly showing off their pride, with 85% of them judging the show to be a success. The far-right microcosm, for its part, is protesting online, and deploring a painting that is offensive to Catholics. The cause is a parody of The Last Supper (or a representation of a banquet of Jupiter?), replayed by a DJ, alongside a dozen drag queens.
It is Marion Maréchal, a newly elected MEP, who dubs these Olympics “J-Woke”. Or Philippe de Villiers, founder of Puy du Fou, who is upset by the “suicide of our country in front of the whole world”. On the other side of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon published a “note” on his blog under the title: “Did I like it or not?” And this, for once, delighted the reactionary press.
“The left does not stand up to defend bigots”
Verdict. “I didn’t like the mockery of the Christian Last Supper, the last meal of Christ and his disciples, the founder of Sunday worship. I’m not, of course, going into the criticism of ‘blasphemy’.” The patriarch of La France insoumise questions the very appropriateness of blaspheming. “What’s the point of risking hurting believers? Even when you’re anticlerical! […] Among the billion Christians in the world, how many brave and honest people are there to whom faith gives help to live and know how to participate in the life of all, without bothering anyone?” the author continues. A position that sparked internal debate, even prompting the person concerned to complete his first note with a second – entitled “The day after I liked or didn’t like” – where he publishes his (calm) exchanges with his comrades. He reassures: “I was expressing, I repeat, a strictly personal point of view.”
A quest for buzz, an anti-woke refocus, an apology for peace or a wink to believers? All four at once? Or an expression of sincere unease? “When academic, scientific and artistic excellence is attacked by the extreme right, the left must defend and assert itself. It does not stand up to defend bigots. That is not its role, that is not its history”, deplores Michaël Delafosse, PS mayor of Montpellier, to L’Express. The LFI deputy of Haute-Garonne Hadrien Clouet tempers: “It is true that it surprised, he says. But has he ever defended the idea that a public ceremony could mobilize in a transgressive way?” The rebels, budding peacemakers.
Raquel Garrido, his former partner, recently excommunicated from LFI, fulminates: “Mélenchon is a good connoisseur of secularism. It is frankly shocking to speak of blasphemy when it comes to a work of art: our school of thought has always proclaimed ‘all license in art’.” The man did not use this highly connoted term, but some people take it that way. “That the one to whom I owe my republican convictions of the 1990s positions himself like this… regrets Michaël Delafosse. I was 16 and I heard Jean-Luc Mélenchon give a speech against the Falloux law in defense of secularism. He spoke about these subjects with incredible force and eloquence. His convictions have evolved,” he mocks. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former self-proclaimed “priest eater”, caught in the act of repentance?
“I have never mocked faith and I never will”
In truth, Mélenchon’s catechism on blasphemy is changeable. “I have never mocked faith and I never will.” The quote from the three-time candidate for the supreme election does not date from the day after the opening ceremony but from April 2012, in the columns of L’Express, when the champion of the Left Front was competing in his first presidential adventure. In our pages, Jean-Luc Mélenchon recounts his youth, that of a young man who “served mass in Latin”, raised in the faith by a practicing Catholic mother. An adolescence marked by readings, such as that of the Jesuit and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and later of the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, the inspiration for liberation theology. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man of faith? “My spirituality goes to a being that does not exist: universal humanity. A mythical being. Does what I feel participate in a certain spirituality? I would not tell you that I am absent of great impulses.”
And yet, the rebel has long been a “secularist”. In the 2010s, traditionalist and fundamentalist Catholic circles were upset by the broadcast of several plays that they considered “offensive” and “blasphemous”, like On the concept of the face of the son of God by Romeo Castellucci, or by Golgota Picnicwritten by Rodrigo Garcia. The Left Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, is protesting against attempts to destabilize these performances. At the Paris Council, its elected representatives denounce an amendment tabled by centrist councilor Yves Pozzo di Borgo aimed at reducing the subsidy of the theater that hosted the first play. In Strasbourg, while Rodrigo Garcia is targeted for a complaint for “blasphemy and attempted blasphemy”, the Left Party is calling for the repeal of the Concordat in Alsace-Moselle.
2015, in Pontoise. A final farewell before Charb’s burial. Mélenchon pays a vibrant tribute to his comrade in arms and friend, assassinated alongside his colleagues from Charlie Hebdo, by Islamist terrorists. “The mocked secularism and the mocked secularists have Charb’s proof of their complete meaning,” he said from the podium. Charlie, newspaper with which he has since broken, denouncing its proximity to the extreme right, and even comparing it to Current Values…
It is the irony of a trajectory, that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, all the more astonishing when reading these few lines of a chapter written as a contribution to Dictionary of secularism (Armand Colin, 2016), entitled “Right to blasphemy”. “The same people who defend blasphemy are the defenders of the theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ […]”, he said of the resurgence of legislation condemning this crime. “For them, ‘to each his own blasphemy, to each his own religion, to each his own civilisation’ is the new motto of modern times. It is nothing but regression compared to the spirit of the Enlightenment and a negation of secularism.”
In 2022, ten years after having already said it without imposing it on his comrades, the candidate announced it to the INA during an interview: “Being surrounded by people who believe, whom I love, and whom I respect, I will no longer make the bad jokes of my youth when we were quite crudely anticlerical to the point of being offensive to those who believed.” Is Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the process of adhering to “this new motto of modern times”?
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