I was a little surprised by Michel Lapierre’s criticism (“An erudite censorship of history”) published in The duty of last August 6 of the book of Mme Laure Murat on the cancel culture. The critic’s analysis of the book seems to mislead readers as to the content of Mrs.me Murat.
The author of Who cancels what? (Seuil, 2022) is nevertheless relatively clear in its discourse. For meme Murat, the militants who practice cancel culture are first and foremost people in search of justice finding themselves short of resources against the impunity of repeated injustices.
It is also quite realistic as to the real balance of power in today’s societies. She writes: the cancel cultureit is also and perhaps first of all this: an immense fed up with a two-speed justice, an immense tiredness of seeing racism and sexism honored, through supposedly irremovable statues or artists considered above the law, when black people are being killed at close range by the police and the statistics of rape and feminicide continue to increase”.
As a historian, she reminds us that it is rather the state that “cancels”, through police violence, injustice and oppression. It is the state that “cancels” through the discourse it values and celebrates—particularly through national holidays and monuments—as well as through the discourse it silences.
This is a major point of the author’s analysis. And that is why she denounces the idea that the militants of the cancel culture can be reduced to mere censors. On this level, the fact that the criticism of his work uses this qualifier no less than three times in addition to using it in the title of his review leaves one doubtful.
In the same vein, with regard to the discourse that would make militants practicing cancel culture dangerous revisionists, the author reminds us that statues and monuments are much more a matter of ideology and state propaganda than of history as a scientific discipline.
Contrary to revisionists of all kinds, it is not a question of denying the facts, but much more of seeking to “translate, in the public space, the new historian and historical concerns” against an outdated heroization of “great men”.
Similarly, contrary to what the critic suggests, M.me Murat nowhere speaks of historical relativism or, as the critic writes, of “the error of adopting radical measures which will ultimately prove to be more oppressive”. For the author of Who cancels what?“activists do not so much eradicate history as they draw public attention to the lessons that governments, by ideological choice, have not learned from past events”.
Finally, the critic To have to writes that Mme Murat concludes by affirming this: “Do not seek the violence of cancel culture elsewhere than in the brutality of power. However, if it makes this assertion, it is precisely, in coherence with what precedes, in the context of the impossibility of certain groups to make themselves heard by the “official” channels of current democracies. Mme Murat instead concludes with a far more buoyant opening when she writes that “it is not the least merit of the cancel culture to fuel this debate, to question official history down to its denials and remanences, to challenge its hierarchy and to encourage greater lucidity, in order to understand what yesterday, and tomorrow, will be made of” .
Of course, the work is too short, makes a quick and simplistic shortcut between the cancel culture and what some call the “wokes” and does not emphasize enough the fact that these movements, like many other progressive movements in the past, were first qualified and defined by their opponents, in this case the right American conservative. I believe, however, that the book brings more nuances than what the review published in your pages suggests.