There is, at the heart of Song of the supporters, a sentence that arouses, when it occurs, a tremendous emotion: “Friend, if you fall, a friend comes out of the shadows in your place”. In the hymn of the Resistance, written by Kessel and Druon, this promise acts as an exhortation. She said: “You are not alone; your fight is not in vain. Your courage, others will have it. Others will be worthy of it.” But it is also a proclamation. A bet, almost. “Friend, if you fall a friend comes out of your place.” Is it really true? It’s the anxious question that grips the heart whenever a freedom fighter is attacked, like Salman Rushdie, on August 12. We can’t resist a brief review of the troops: support, we see it, of course; but how many “yes, but”? And how much indifference? Or frightened silence? We would like a terrible crash to thunder. Let “the freedom camp” make its firmness heard in the face of intimidation. The ace ! We say to ourselves that the brave are sometimes quite alone. That we don’t deserve them.
On days like these, I think of all those who live under threat for defying Islamism. Those who somehow tame fear – is there another definition of courage? – and that attacks like the one against Salman Rushdie, 33 years after the fatwa enacted against him, come to plunge back into anguish. If France is indeed the “universal conservatory of freedom”*, if it is the homeland of Voltaire, who was the first to dare to project his philosophy against the shackles of dogma, then our nation and our society must constantly reaffirm their support for these fighters there. Without allowing itself to be paralyzed by false humanists, who only like democracies that are politically disarmed – the fact that France did not know how, this summer, to expel Imam Iquioussen, a preacher of hatred against apostates, Jews, homosexuals, etc. should alert us.
Nor should we allow ourselves to be intimidated by the sermons of those who castigate the laity and the “blasphemers”, whom they consider materialistic and decadent, insulting towards the faithful and insensitive to transcendence. They are wrong. Man is this curious being who, for freedom – that of creating or speaking – is sometimes liable to pay with his life. Who is it ? If not transcendence? “Crush fanaticism and venerate the infinite, such is the law”, writes Victor Hugo in Wretched. You have to be blind not to see it: there is infinity in Rushdie’s work and life. Courage to him. And to others. They are “the praetorian guard of freedom”*.
*These two expressions are from Daniel Cordier.