History Readings

But it wasn’t just the powerful who felt the sting of cartoonist’s pens. In 19th-century Europe and America, minority groups who felt maligned, like Jews or Irish-Americans, also lodged frequent complaints against what they saw as stereotypes, only to be largely ignored.

Continuing censorship battles in the 20th century gave rise to underground comics, with their nothing-is-sacred sensibility. And Charlie Hebdo, which arose in the wake of the 1960s battles over France’s then-restrictive speech laws, did outré political satire better than just about anyone, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said.

When it reprinted the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006, “they were the only magazine to do it for absolutely the right reasons,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “The others that published the cartoons were baiting Muslims, but for them it was part of their self-perceived mission to be provocative, to provoke thought.”

But not everyone in the comics world has taken such an admiring view. Mr. Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter said that when he posted some of what he called Charlie Hebdo’s “ugly, racist” covers in a show of solidarity on Wednesday, he got a number of emails from cartoonists challenging the decision.

“Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech,” Mr. Spurgeon said.

“In the face of a really horrible attack on free speech, it’s important that we don’t blindly disseminate super-racist material,” he said in an interview, referring to some colleagues’ decisions to repost some of Charlie Hebdo’s particularly extreme cartoons.

The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Mr. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy, and Mr. Valls called again on Saturday for citizens to join the rally planned for Sunday.

Today nearly half the city’s public schools either have low graduation rates or rank in the bottom 5 percent of state schools in math and English.

So, oddly, liberal supporters of abortion rights are allied, on this issue, with the conservative descendants of Confederate veterans. Both argue that license plates are private, not state, messages and are therefore protected.

We don’t agree. We think that Texas was right to reject the Confederate plates, but that North Carolina should have issued the abortion rights plates.How can this be? Are we merely siding with liberals in both cases? No.

Under constitutional doctrine, when private individuals express themselves, the government cannot discriminate based on their opinions. But when government is speaking (as in messages on public monuments, for example) it can and in fact must pick and choose.

Texas rightly sought to avoid the perception that the state was speaking in a way that is contrary to constitutional values like equal protection under the law. It wanted to avoid even the risk of seeming complicit in official nostalgia for the institution of slavery.

Why is the North Carolina case different? Unlike in the Texas case, there is no strong government interest in denying pro-choice messages. The right to terminate a pregnancy is currently enshrined in law; the government does not have an important interest in preventing citizens from advertising their existing rights.

Yet, at the same time, most of us know that provocateurs and other outlandish figures serve useful public roles. Satirists and ridiculers expose our weakness and vanity when we are feeling proud. They puncture the self-puffery of the successful. They level social inequality by bringing the mighty low. When they are effective they help us address our foibles communally, since laughter is one of the ultimate bonding experiences.

If you try to pull off this delicate balance with law, speech codes and banned speakers, you’ll end up with crude censorship and a strangled conversation.

Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people.

Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct.

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating.

“I think this anxiety is the idea of seeing France give up on itself, of changing to the point of no longer being recognizable,” said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, whose much-debated 2013 book, “L’identité Malheureuse,” or “The Unhappy Identity,” discussed the problems immigration poses for French identity and cultural integration. “People are homesick at home,

Mr. Houellebecq rejected the idea that literature could alter events.“I don’t have other examples of a novel changing the course of history,” Mr. Houellebecq said on the same program. “Other things change the course of history. Essays, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ things like that, but not novels. That has never happened.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Mr. Houellebecq called the novel “a political fiction,” in the same vein as those of Joseph Conrad or John Buchan.

Commentators said that both “The French Suicide” and “Submission” would ultimately shore up the political fortunes of the National Front, a growing if incoherent mix of anti-establishment nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-NATO and anti-European Union fervor.

“The left has nothing to propose or to respond, and Zemmour and Houellebecq profit from this absence,” said Eric Naulleau, Mr. Zemmour’s more left-leaning co-host on a weekly television program and the author of a 2005 essay critical of Mr. Houellebecq.“One flees to the past and the other flees to the future,” Mr. Naulleau added of the two authors, “but neither offers any answers.”

Others, though, insist that the sources of the violence are alienation and resentment, not theology. They argue that the authoritarian rulers of Arab states — who have tried for decades to control Muslim teaching and the application of Islamic law — have set off a violent backlash expressed in religious ideas and language.

Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian, was teaching at New York University on Sept. 11, 2001, after which American sales of the Quran spiked because readers sought religious explanations for the attack on New York.“We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question,” he said. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.“The Arab states have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver and it can only lead to a deep sense of resentment and frustration, or to revolution,” he said. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence.”

Only a very small number of Muslims pin the blame directly on the religion itself.

M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, sought to quantify the correlation between Islam and violence. In his book, “Are Muslims Distinctive?,” he found that murder rates were substantially lower in Muslim-majority countries and instances of political violence were no more frequent.

Over a 15-year period ending in 2008, Islamist militants were responsible for 60 percent of high-casualty terrorist bombings, his study found, but almost all were concentrated in just a handful of Muslim-majority countries in the context of larger conflicts that were occurring — places like Afghanistan after the American invasion or Algeria after the military takeover.

“Is Islam violent? I would say absolutely not,” Mr. Fish said in an interview. “There is very little empirical evidence that Islam is violent.”