The French (bloodied) finger

The French Parliament is discussing a bill that punishes the negation of officially recognized genocides. If the proposition of the UMP's (Sarkozy’s party) deputy Valérie Boyer becomes a law, anyone who expresses an opinion that contradicts the approved history will be subject to one year imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 Euros. Censorship will be institutionalized in the Hexagon.

(To be sure, negation of the Nazi Holocaust is already punishable in the same terms, which makes of France a country where freedom of speech is threatened already now.)

Why would a society that so intransigently defends the right to speak out in other spheres (see here, for example, how the French were eager to defend their right to publish cartoons of Mohammed) be headed in such an obliquitous direction?

The bill started with a proposition that would punish only the negation of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, a sad page of human history that tends to be ignored and even denied by the Turkish, but that has received official recognition by France already in 2001, when Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin signed a decree that registered that event in the pages of French world historiography. Incidentally, the French state has not hitherto written the history of the four-decades more recent genocide in Algeria.

Why did France feel the need to “recognize” a genocide in a distant Empire of the early 20th Century? Why did it not instead direct its efforts towards either recognizing or doing thorough historical research on the Algerian massacre during the Algerian independence war in the 1950s?

One cannot but suspect that different weights are systematically being applied to freedom of speech when it comes to speaking out about religious matters that concern others, particularly Muslims, and when it comes to speaking out about delicate issues that have to do with the history of the living generation of Frenchmen. 

Standing for the truth, even when the killing of millions is at stake, is far from being an obviously superior moral principle than allowing full freedom of speech, especially in a place such as France. But even if we accept that more importance must be given to the ethical principle of historic truth, then why has one particular genocide been left out of the debate?

To make things worse: even if the Algerian genocide one day gets registered in the pages of the French state’s historiography, how can we be sure that a thousand other truths are not being left out? Morover, in a world where scientists, and historians, cannot but disagree on every single bit of their subject matters, how are we to believe that history written by politicians is superior to history developed in academia and shaped by open public debate?