with Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, all of which depend on the removal of indigenous inhabitants and are illegal under international law.
In France today, Hessel calls on the young, many of whom have already marched through the streets with their inchoate fury at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “reforms.” They resent the balance Sarkozy is achieving between benefiting the banks while depriving the unemployed, the old, students, immigrants and the poor. Hessel’s call for a renewal of the spirit of the Resistance, albeit a pacific one, resonates in French traditions that immigrants embrace. It will do the same for youth in Britain and the United States , whom Hessel calls upon to remember their history and to defend its highest achievements.
Students at the École Normale invited Hessel to address them in Paris in January. Popular with young people throughout France , Hessel was likely to attract a full house. Then the authorities stepped in. Monique Canto-Sperber, the school’s director, withdrew the invitation and refused to allow Hessel to give an address. She objected to his insistence that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applied as much to Palestinians as to the French. An ultra-Zionist French website, Des Infos, praised Canto-Sperber’s decision: “There are men and women in this country of intellectual courage. Mme. Monique Canto-Sperber, director of the École Normale Supérieure, is an example. She has on the afternoon of 12 January 2011 canceled a scandalous conference- debate.”
This may be the first time, in an ostensibly free country, that praise has been applied to the “courage” of canceling a debate. Such courage was not confined to the censorious director of the school. The Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France lauded those who favored suppressing Hessel’s right to speak. They included Minister of Higher Education Valérie Pécresse, self-styled philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, Claude Cohen-Tanoudji and Arielle Schwab. The administrations at other colleges succumbed to the pressure and refused to allow Hessel to speak on their campuses.
Victory for free speech? In the bizarre world of what passes for philosophical discussion in modern France , to prevent someone from speaking could be nothing else. Canto-Sperber wrote in her book Moral Disquiet and Human Life, “Freedom of thought is the first precondition of any thought process.” Her students are free to think any thought presented to them by the lecturers she approves. What more freedom does their thought require? The reaction has been swift. Thousands of people have signed petitions demanding that Hessel be permitted to speak, and thousands more are reading this book.
In London , on the seventieth anniversary of de Gaulle’s “Appeal of 18 June” urging the French people to resist, Hessel said, “I was 23 in 1940, so needless to say that those five years really had a huge impact on me. This is a war that I experienced in many ways: as a simple soldier in 1939 and 1940 before the French Army’s defeat, as a trainee in the Royal Air Force, as a Free French fighter working in the secret services in London, as a Resistance fighter in France, as a prisoner at the hands of the Gestapo and then as an inmate in two concentration camps.… Of this long and arduous adventure, something clearly emerged: the need to give a sense to my life by defending the values that the Nazis had scorned-which led me to become a diplomat immediately after the war and to join the United Nations, where I contributed to writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Hessel’s polemic echoes de Gaulle’s words of June 1940: “Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”
The old Resistance fighter is battling those who would deny him his well-earned platform. Having taken on the Nazis, survived two concentration camps and kept his mind and spirit intact for ninety-three years, he should easily defeat Sarkozy’s fonctionnaires and their apologists. The question before us is, Will we stand up to demand our own right to be heard?
