Do you know “knitters”? This is the name given to the Revolution to these women who attended the sessions of the revolutionary tribunal while knitting. Because of their pronounced taste for the scaffold, they were also nicknamed the “furies of the guillotine”. Enticed by the smell of blood, these disciples of Robespierre will never stop dipping their handkerchiefs in that of the victims. They will express what is most repugnant in the crowd, this propensity of the masses to abandon all restraint – in the name of good – to lynch the one who, guilty or not, has been designated for vindictiveness.
The sad sequence which has just unfolded concerning Gérard Depardieu will have offered us a new example. The process does not vary much. Here, a show known for its jaundiced attitude and specializing in score-settling displays the comedian’s vulgar and provocative remarks in profusion. Comments which were not intended to be made public since they were recovered without his knowledge and that of the director in the scraps of an aborted film shot in 2018 in Korea. The film is teeming with Reiser-style insanity and Charlie Hebdo carefully built to a crescendo for the sole purpose of adding fuel to the suspicions of rape hanging over the movie star. A prosecution case essentially intended to suggest that there would be continuity between salacious and misogynistic remarks, sexist attitudes, accusations of inappropriate touching and… rape! As if it were enough, to convince anyone of murder, to demonstrate that they swear and fight in the alley.
However, beyond the clamor of the media, the main scandal in this affair is not in what Gérard Depardieu said, did or thought. For ordinary mortals, it will always be difficult to judge these words of which they do not know the context – words that no one defends, moreover. As for his actions, the actor will have to answer in court anyway. The real scandal is first of all in the disgusting voyeurism and the abject and totalitarian pack effect of which he is the object. Because, with all due respect to our new knitters, in a democratic and liberal society, even the most heinous of criminals has the right to respect for his private life and should be protected from lynching which consists of “cancelling” him, in short, of administering the sentence before the shadow of a trial has taken place.
Without the accused even having the right to speak and a contradictory debate having been able to take place, in the time it takes to say so, his medals are withdrawn, his name is removed from the posters, he is forced to interrupt his shows, his statue was removed from the Grévin museum and his films were censored. All that’s left to do is spit on him the next time we meet him in the street, which some people don’t mind doing. It is to the credit of Emmanuel Macron, unlike François Legault, to have had the prudence to stay away from what he himself described as a “manhunt”.
In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of real parallel justice. Priesthood has become an ordinary process allowing the victimized new left to take justice into their own hands independently of judicial institutions and the rules of law. Exit the presumption of innocence! The mere mention of “sexual misconduct”, a term which lumps together both saucy comments and rape, is enough for the plague victim to be carried out manu militari.
The philosopher René Girard revealed a long time ago this archaic process which restores social harmony by channeling mimetic violence into the sacrifice of a scapegoat. George Orwell illustrated this wonderfully in 1984 by staging these “Two Minutes of Hatred” where the joyous fury of the multitude is expressed against the one who desecrated “the purity of the party”.
In a recent text from the journal Argument, the political scientist Ève Séguin and the lawyer Julius Gray recall how, in 2016, this way of doing things which sets up emotion as an absolute criterion had made it possible to erase overnight the memory of an artist as essential as Claude Jutra from the public space and our history. And this, without a single alleged victim having ever filed an official complaint.
In his abundant and excellent essay Totalitarianism without the gulag, the sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté amply documents this expeditious justice which has today become an essential component of what he calls the “diversity regime”. It allows for the immediate sanctioning of intellectuals, politicians, teachers or even the dead guilty of having broken the rules of the new diversity ethic.
In defiance of all rule of law, here are teachers who lose their jobs, journalists who are threatened with death, politicians whose bank accounts are withdrawn, books which are sent to the pestle. And this, without the slightest contradictory debate.
Everything happens as if our new enlightened elites were so convinced of their rights that they believed themselves above justice. Greater sensitivity towards sexual assault may well be justified, but it cannot authorize such violations of the right to a trial and scrupulous respect for the presumption of innocence, which do the honor of our democracies. In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the extravagance of exhuming his predecessor Formosa to bring an impeachment trial against him. Even his swaying remains on his throne adorned with papal attributes had had the right to a lawyer.