Thirty years ago I ate my first quenelle, a dumpling shaped like a sausage. The one I ate was the real thing, made of flour, butter, eggs, milk and ground pike. Swimming in a creamy fish sauce, the dumpling was mushy and a bit too fishy for my taste, but I savored the experience, eating a real quenelle in a French country inn, right next to the stream where the pike was caught.
That was thirty years ago. Quenelles are no longer such a popular dish in France. Few restaurants serve them and many young people wouldn’t even know what they are.
In fact, if you ask your typical young French person to define one, he doesn’t even think of food. Instead, he’ll tell you the “quenelle” is an anti-establishment salute, and, depending on who you’re talking to, an act of solidarity with the salute’s “creator,” the French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who first used it in a 2005 comedy routine. Dieudonné (“God-given”), as he is known to the French public, recently declared, “2014 will be the year of the quenelle”—and he was definitely not talking about dumplings!
So how has the name of a traditional French dish become the rallying point of a French comic and his thousands of followers?
It’s all about freedom of expression and how it is defined in France, a nation where it is extensive but not absolute. In 1972, a law was passed to make it a crime to incite racial hatred by speech, print or any others means. In 1990, it became an offense to deny crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Since 1992, heavier fines and longer prison sentences can be imposed on those found guilty of breaking either law. Dieudonné’s “quenelle” puts all these laws to the test, demonstrating that limiting freedom of expression can be a double-edged sword.
Dieudonné’s “quenelle” has been described as a reverse Nazi salute. The right arm stiffens and begins to rise, but, just as quickly, the left hand crosses the chest and holds it down. When I first saw a Dieudonné fan making a “quenelle,” I thought of Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove, the mad ex-Nazi scientist working for the US government. Still a Nazi at heart, he has a hard time controlling his right arm, conditioned to express its devotion to Hitler, so he must constantly use his left hand to keep it down.
This is the salute that has spread like wildfire across France. Though Dieudonné denies its relation to Nazism, claiming it’s an “up yours” kind of gesture (“quenelle” is also a nickname for suppositories), his fans have not understood it that way.
In early January, two 17-year-olds were expelled from their high school in Montgeron, a town south of Paris, because of a photo posted on-line. In it, one of the boys is shown making a “quenelle” while posing next to a pineapple, a reference to another Dieudonné standard, his song “Shoahnanas,” a blending of the words Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, and ananas, French for “pineapple.” The two boys admitted they were using these symbols to target their math teacher, who is Jewish.
In December 2013, Alain Soral, a controversial essayist known for his anti-Semitic views, was photographed making the same salute in front of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Yet, Dieudonné still insists, the “quenelle” is not about anti-Semitism—and many might agree. His “quenelle” is a symbol, open to interpretation, and Dieudonné could always argue that those high school students and the anti-Semitic essayist were interpreting it the wrong way.
To accept that point of view, however, we’d have to overlook much about Dieudonné himself. For example, in an April 2010 interview on Iranian TV, he explains that Zionism (he never uses the word “Judaism”) is no more than lies and manipulation, and in the West, where freedom of conscience does not exist, Zionism has turned us all into slaves. Dieudonné, a self-proclaimed liberator, is using laughter to set us free.
We’d also have to overlook his recent remark about a French radio host who is Jewish and who refused to have him on his show: “Patrick Cohen…hmm…the gas chambers…what a shame.”
And there are many other examples, enough to have lead to seven condemnations for inciting racial hatred.
On January 9, 2014, this inglorious record prompted the top court in France, the Council of State, to reinstate a ban on Dieudonné’s show after a lower court had overturned it, placing in jeopardy the comic’s six-month tour of all the major cities of France. To justify its decision, the Council underlined the content of Dieudonné’s show and its attack on human dignity. It also claimed that allowing the show to go on posed a serious threat to public order.
In the days leading up to the Council’s decision, Dieudonné got top billing on the evening news—free publicity, in other words, for a mediocre comic who uses anti-Semitism and controversy to keep his career alive.
In 2008, during another tour, Dieudonné appeared on stage with Robert Faurisson, a “well-known” French Holocaust-denier. In the 1960’s, he was a literary scholar hungry for recognition. Not until he turned from literature to a full-time career as a Holocaust-denier, claiming the gas chambers at Auschwitz were for killing lice, did he achieve a nation-wide reputation—to the point that the 1990 French law against Holocaust-denial was passed in large part because of him.
.jpg)
Writing about Dieudonné and other French anti-Semites, my goal is not to convince readers that anti-Semitism is more rife in France than elsewhere. For proof of that, readers need only click on this link to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to find a Holocaust denial timeline: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008003. A majority of the Holocaust-deniers are Americans, but, as opposed to Dieudonné, they have not become household words.
And here I return to the double-edged nature of freedom of speech and its limits. In the USA, where it is guaranteed by the First Amendment, Dieudonné’s show would definitely go on. He could spread as much racial hatred as he wanted and, let’s hope, get the attention he deserved. In France, where he is constantly breaking the law, he keeps himself constantly in the spotlight, making opportunistic use of limits placed on freedom of expression.
When I was a chubby little girl, my mom told me to ignore people who called me names. And she was right—they soon gave up and went away.
Published in The Republican Herald of Pottsville, PA, January 26, 2014
