Considering Ethnic Group Tensions: The Symptomatic Case of French Comedian Dieudonné

Abstract

This article examines the 2014 case of French comedian Dieudonné and his purported incitement to hatred through his comedy act at the time, which hit national headlines and danced along the line of acceptable speech and making fun of the Holocaust. At the same time, Dieudonné's comedy appealed to a faction of French society that felt relegated and ignored by the French elite, a sentiment that was furthered by a clash between one religious group that has legal protections in place to protect it from Holocaust denial, versus another group that does not have similar protections in place for Islamophobic acts. This case study demonstrates how Dieudonné tapped into these sensitive areas of cultural life by engaging the communicative genres of humour and satire to draw attention to and toy with making fun of the Holocaust, though his comedy act, Le Mur (The Wall), a silly song about the Holocaust, and an arm gesture called the 'quenelle'. Using a textual thematic analysis of online newspaper articles collected at the time from Le Figaro and Le Monde, as well as transcripts from ten in-person, semi-structured interviews conducted in Paris with activists, journalists, politicians, a lawyer, and a comedian, what the findings point to is that while Dieudonné appealed to a disenfranchised audience as a 'provocateur', he also highlighted how key factions of French society are struggling with inclusivity and a lack of social cohesion in a political context where laïcité, the separation of religious life and political life, is sacrosanct. of the topic and the humourous treatment of it, and the dangers that this presents. This article focuses on how, and in what ways, the communicative role of humour and satire facilitated the journey of Dieudonné's comedy by not only undermining the Holocaust, but also as exploiting larger societal and cultural fractures in the French context. The Dieudonné case shows how a comedian, incentivised perhaps for financial reasons, tapped into the cultural frustrations of a group that felt marginalised and undermined, and was propelled by a form of inflammatory speech that was sure to receive attention. So, on the one hand, the issue then not only becomes one of challenging sensitive cultural mores about the remembrance of the Holocaust, but on the other hand requires us to acknowledge that a portion of the French population has not lived a similar history as those linked to the Holocaust. This presents unique challenges to how the cultural memory of an event like the Holocaust is preserved. In a national context where the lived memories of those generations that experienced World War II are being committed to time and history, the question of how events like the Holocaust will be remembered is an important one (Gorrara, 2018: 111). This is also taking into consideration what is sometimes described as a ' cultural obsession', which must acknowledge the tensions between individual memory, collective memory, and representation, because 'memories are constructed and mediated via specific culturally co...