Blanche Gardin, Oxmo Puccino, Enki Bilal… have been worried about freedom of expression since the Bastien Vivès affair
About forty personalities estimate the company “on the verge of obscurantism” since the questioning of the author of comics accused of child ****ography.
The Bastien Vives caseauthor whose the exhibition at the Angoulême Festival was canceled in the midst of a controversy over the child ****ography of his work, is it indicative of a new form of censorship in the arts? Yes, if we are to believe a column signed by around forty personalities who express their concern in The world. “Questioning or challenging an author’s work is legitimate, but gagging is not.“, explain the signatories, anxious to find a balanced position in a thorny affair. “Some consider that [Bastien Vivès] was pilloried, others that he largely contributed to his disgrace by detestable verbal excesses, even if he apologized“, summarizes the text whose claimed function “is not to defend it“.
The actress Blanche Gardinthe musician Oxmo Puccinoauthors Enki BilalJean-Christophe Chauzy, Jean-Marc Rochette (who has announced that he will abandon comics since this affair), the former Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen, the designer coconutjointly state that “ano author can create while trembling”. “How could an artist still take risks, question his dark side (and ours), seek to shake up, to stir human passions, to question our common condition – sometimes dark – by asking himself, at each of his productions, if his next outfit will not be made of tar and feathers?“, they wonder. They refer to the “offense of contempt of good moralswhich took Flaubert and Baudelaire to court, claiming that “the evocation of evil is not his approval of it”.
Asserting himself “viscerally committed to child protection», the signatories also want to “defenders of creative freedom». “Reintroducing a control of thought and its expressions prepares a world of degraded freedoms of which our children will be the very victims. they say, warning against a society “on the verge of obscurantism”.
Read alsoWho wants the skin of the turbulent and provocative Bastien Vivès?
In a long message published on social networks in mid-Decemberthe author of Polina, today targeted by an investigation for dissemination of child ****ography images, had presented its “sincerest apologies” to those who may have been shocked by some of his statements and refuted any complacency towards child ****ography.
Read alsoAngoulême: the Bastien Vivès affair continues to heat up people’s minds
