“The whole of France wants me dead,” says the girl known in the media only by the mononym “Mila.” In reality, it’s more like half. France is divided over L’Affaire Mila, as the controversy she sits at the center of has become known. For over a year, it has dragged in politicians at the height of power, dominated the French internet, and upended Mila’s own life. It all started when Mila went live on her Instagram on Jan. 18, 2020, to show off her new hair and talk makeup. A follower started hitting on her aggressively, and she said that he was not her type for more reasons than one: She’s a lesbian, and she’s personally not into “blacks and Arabs.”
Mila’s profile lit up with a torrent of online insults from presumably sexually insulted followers. Some, including ones she identified as Muslim, called her a “dirty lesbian” and a “whore,” threatened to find her and her family and kill and rape her, and complained that “you attack Islam whereas we cannot say anything on the gay.” Mila, an atheist who also criticizes Christianity, went all-in ranting about Islam and religion in general. Press reports are almost hilariously precious about transcribing what she said, but it included saying Islam is “a religion of hate” and a “s*** religion,” or words that translate to that effect.
“Freedom of speech: Have you heard of it?” Mila said in a follow-up. “I don’t have any issue saying what I think. I hate religion. The Koran is about hatred. It’s full of hatred. Islam is bulls***. That’s what I think, and I say what I think. I’m not racist at all. You can’t be racist toward a religion, and those who believe that are so f***ing dumb. You can’t be racist toward a religion. I stated my view, and it’s my right. I stated my view, and you’re not going to make me regret it. … Your religion is bulls***. Thanks, goodbye.”
Things deteriorated from there. There were enough threats against her, leveled with enough seriousness, that authorities advised Mila to stay out of her school and to go into hiding after its location was posted. By the beginning of that February, the interior minister reported to the National Assembly that Mila and her family were under police protection.
According to the BBC, “police initially opened two investigations: the first into whether Mila was guilty of hate speech, and the second into her online attackers.” Thankfully, authorities have since dropped the hate speech case against Mila, as she was expressing a personal opinion on religion and not targeting individuals. Mila now has to avoid her old school permanently, since it is deemed unsafe for her to return.
President Emmanuel Macron waded in belatedly on her side of things, affirming that “blasphemy is no crime.” However, this was only after Minister of Justice Nicole Belloubet said that Mila’s remarks were an attack on religious freedom of conscience (and later apologized under pressure for l’inexactitude of her response). Hashtags declaring “I am Mila” and “I am not Mila” dug in like front-line trenches in a cultural battle across the country.
The affair has once again forced France to grapple with an underlying tension between two cultural values. The first is that of fraternité, the national value of unity and goodwill between various factions. The second is that of laïcité, France’s term for the value of official irreligiosity that grants a privileged legal and cultural status to the secular (think “laity” or “layman,” etymologically). It has also laid bare the troubles of attempting to police cultural norms through statist means.
This summer, Mila arrived in court, but not as a defendant. Laïcité won, though the status of state enforcement of fraternité remains ambiguous. After initial moves to prosecute her heretical words, the French state in the end found her attackers to be the guilty party, criminally abusive and threatening. French prosecutors brought charges against 13 people for harassing Mila and making death threats under a 2018 law imposing harsh penalties for abusive online invective, a separate though overlapping category of speech crime that is becoming its own sort of blasphemy in a digital age. Eleven were convicted with suspended prison sentences, which Mila described as a step on the road to victory.
The French Revolutionary era wit Chamfort, before his eventual and inevitable death by the Jacobins, once joked that the vaunted values of liberté, egalité, and fraternité had come to amount to the demand to “be my brother, or I’ll kill you.” Chamfort had perceived the fundamental difference between a secular open society that demands adherence from everyone and one that merely requires that everyone not demand adherence from anyone else. In this sense, his insight was the same that caused Burke to support the American Revolution and deplore the French one. Both saw the Reign of Terror coming.
There have long been multiple distinct cultural and legal models for how to run a secular, liberal, pluralist society. To its great credit, France today is more concerned with preserving and rebuilding cathedrals than with tearing them down. But as its traditionally unbending secular ethos clashes awkwardly with the equally unequivocal if much less explicit demands of multicultural inclusiveness, it is struggling with itself over what kind of toleration it wishes to achieve.
France has always been much more loudly irreligious in its laws and its cultural fashions than is America and much of the rest of Europe. The French concept of laïcité was added late as a sort of junior partner to the trio Chamfort derided the Jacobins for disgracing. It is an idea that Mila embodies clearly.
At the heart of L’Affaire Mila lies the basic issue of the tension between the freedoms of religion and speech in Western democracies. Blasphemy is a speech act under any definition, and several EU states have blasphemy prohibitions on the books. Ireland only axed its (long-dormant) law last year. But it is anachronistic to see the sole or even primary purpose of the wall between church and state as about how to protect the irreligious from the oppressions of the religious.
The highest purpose of secular pluralism is about protecting the religious factions from one another. America’s model, what might be called the “Vine and Fig Tree Model,” is much more explicitly aimed at keeping various religious factions from trying to use official or state power to dominate any others. It doesn’t elevate a secular civil religion so much as prohibit any other faction from trying to elevate itself officially. Thomas Jefferson may have inserted the metaphor of the wall between church and state into the vocabulary, but it was George Washington who elucidated it most sharply in assuring a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that had written to ask if there would be an allowance in America for their particular form of worship. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote.
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. …
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Washington is quoting the Book of Micah, and he is calling for active goodwill among classes of people. But, you’ll notice, he is also very careful. What he assures them, specifically, is that the government will stay out of things. Everything is framed in the negative: no sanction, no assistance. No blasphemy laws. We may hope for goodwill and mutual support among citizens, but failing that, safety lies in the fact that nobody wields the weapon of state power against anyone else.
Mila’s personal saga may be resolving somewhat, as the trial is over, and the government has long since found her a new school. She feels safe enough to appear on television and show up in court. Mila seems determined not to have to live a 1990s Salman Rushdie-like existence for very long, though if the prosecution did not succeed at making an example of the convicted, it seems possible that any ongoing online harassment could result in still more legal action against her many enemies.
If she is under mortal threat, her detractors say, then that is her own fault, the rightful consequences of blasphemy. Soon after her videos went viral, a senior member of the French Council of the Muslim Faith told a radio interviewer that Mila “asked for it” and that “you reap what you sow,” before being contradicted by the organization’s president, who had to declare that “nothing justifies death threats.” But if Mila is guilty of intentional, premeditated, and unrepentant blasphemy, a sort of blasphemy in the first degree, it’s important to note that blasphemy is a “crime” that cannot be avoided.
In A.D. 325, Emperor Constantine I convoked the Council of Nicaea to meet at what is now the Turkish town of Iznik, a little under an hour and a half drive from Istanbul. The early Christian theologians were charged with settling on a formulation of the basic, core beliefs of Christianity that the factions could unite around, divided as they were over the question of the nature of Jesus Christ. Some believed he had one nature, some two natures, and some three natures. Each side regarded the other positions as heresy. And there are still today “monophysite” Christians and “dyophysite” Christians, and of course there are the most common Christians, believers in the triple nature of Christ. But culturally, much more than we remember that historical split, we remember this point of unity from 126 years earlier, the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, the only-begotten, born of the Father before all ages.” It’s the single most agreeable sentence in Christian history, and a long list of Christian sects over the centuries regard it, essentially, as blasphemy.
Here’s another heresy: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.” That’s the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. It’s the first pillar of Islam, and there is no Islam without it. It is also, in its way, blasphemy against religions that take it as a core part of their creed that there are multiple gods, or that Muhammad isn’t a prophet. Almost every religion, certainly every Abrahamic religion, implicitly blasphemes the others.
One thing New Atheists often misunderstood is that there’s nothing singular about religion in this respect; any irreconcilable difference of belief is a sort of disagreement. Barring a one-party state or a theocracy, we have to live and vote and regulate social media in a society with people we sincerely and conscientiously disagree with. The challenge facing pluralistic, open societies is figuring out how we can be ecumenical about it. That is how we avoid arriving at the illiberal solution, having one faction officially dominate the others. Both France’s hands-on laïcité and America’s hands-off Vine and Fig Tree models are working answers to this problem.
And that is where L’Affaire Mila is so interesting and so dispiriting. The Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015 and the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, among many other less famous cases, should have settled these matters once and for all. But the initial queasy waffling in response to the Mila case is a function of the growing power of a third model of toleration, one that is fundamentally inferior to the traditional liberal models of either France or America.
In order to manage the guilty consciences of those in the West, this illiberal, multicultural Left model requires that citizens actively celebrate rather than merely tolerate the presence of other factions of belief. The new model demands as a requirement of good citizenship not just Washington’s requirement of effectual support, but enthusiastic support of certain groups seen as benighted and therefore as requiring special, condescending cultural and legal carve-outs.
That support is almost always deserved when it takes the form of general bonhomie. But it is destructive when it takes the form of official pushes to disallow a schoolgirl from expressing herself. What’s more, it’s based on the apparent belief that French Muslims are uniquely unable to pay the price of admission to a pluralistic society by relinquishing the demand for legal enforcement of religious morality. That this belief is preposterously condescending in its assumptions about French blacks and Arabs is a large part of why it holds so much sway with the self-flattering urbane and educated, who ultimately picture themselves as the supreme moral and intellectual adults in a world of children who cannot help but throw a tantrum by murdering cartoonists or novelists when “provoked.” And it’s why Mila knew right away to say, “You can’t be racist toward a religion.”
Multiculturalism is, in my view, a great thing. But good causes, as Irving Howe imperishably observed, attract bad advocates. The latest champions of a multicultural and diverse society are harming their own goals, because they wrongly think they invented the idea and have the only way to achieve it: official and quasi-official censorship.
With its bans on wearing “overt religious symbols” such as kippas, crosses, and veils in schools, France’s model of secularism is much more statist than America’s pluralism. And, of course, those two countries don’t exhaust the cultural landscape of Western liberal culture, in which the same kind of issues are being constantly hashed out, with less and less success. After the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in the summer of 2016, a near-official silence has been maintained in most legacy media outlets about the fact that the motivation is better summed up as jihadism than homophobia. In Denmark in 2017, a man was prosecuted for blasphemy for burning a Koran. (Burning books is not illegal in general there.) In 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck the same reluctant tone Macron has used around Mila when Germany demanded the prosecution of a German national for penning a poem insulting to President Erdogan. The United Kingdom has seen an expansion of prosecutions for speech that is, among other things, “insulting.”
The culture of offense-taking is trans-Atlantic, and what it really opposes is not so much giving offense in general, but giving offense against certain protected exceptions. Insults against certain ethnic groups and blasphemy against certain religions are much more liable than others to lead to demands for state punishment and reeducation.
So as Mila knew, for some people, Islamophobia was going to trump homophobia in this system. A significant segment of French society, and members of its government, did and do feel that she should be the one defending her words in court, and it was her words and not the eventual defendants’ that catapulted the affair to such major public attention. She knew her definitely blasphemous and putatively racist comments might start a national controversy, whereas someone being grossly boorish to her certainly would not.
And if French society is at best semi-competent at enforcing official secularism, it is completely ill-equipped to do the same for the enwokened version of multiculturalism. Nonetheless, the new model is pushing for certain ideas and words to lose out not just in civil society, but by law. To some, insulting Islam and the like can’t just be disgraceful and unfashionable things to do; they must be punishable. Societal norms such as social stigma and public shame used to be seen as satisfying recourse for dealing with supposedly unacceptable ideas, but no more. The illiberal model of state regulation of ideas and expression always leads to calls for Orwellian regulations of personal speech. In this sense, it is not just creepier but also more inept, as these measures do not successfully suppress ideas even as they impose terrible costs.
Nonetheless, this model is getting increasing buy-in, and the older views of toleration are losing defenders. Why doesn’t the French Left balk more forcefully at the idea that the government should do something about a schoolgirl blaspheming Islam on her social media account? Because the Left comes much too close to agreeing that her words should be prosecutable. Scandalously disagreeable speech has begun to look like it should be criminal in the eyes of too much of the Left in the rest of Europe and America, too — and, for that matter, those of the Right.
This negation of the basic foundations of plural Western society must be resisted and overturned. “Be my brother, or I’ll prosecute you” is not as absurd as Chamfort’s original formulation, but it’s close. The best way to make toleration a reality is not to try to make us accept one another in our hearts, but just to make it clear that we’re not allowed to do anything about it if we don’t.
I don’t at all agree with Mila that Islam is inherently a religion of hate, and I don’t happen to agree with the Nicene Creed or the shahada either. What I agree with is a model of society in which it doesn’t matter so much what I think, or what anyone thinks, or what anyone puts on their Instagram story, so long as there shall be none to make her afraid.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
