Book Censorship in Paris

by Peter Lennon

IN 1742 France had sixty-nine censors, including one for geography and navigation. In 1810 Napoleon, against all advice, reinstituted censorship, but soon had reason to complain, “ I blush for the Nation, my censor is indeed inept!”; and in 1815, on his return from Elba, realizing too late what an unreliable weapon censorship is, abolished this institution. Since then, for almost one hundred and fifty years, with the notorious exception of the period of Vichy control, France has informed the world, at times with superb confidence, at times a trifle furtively, that it is the country of intellectual freedom. Any adult may write what he likes, and any publisher may have it printed and circulated for adult consumption. This is still true.

There is no censor, but if Flaubert were to come today before one of the tribunals which deal with offenses against decency in literature, instead of the one which acquitted him in 1857, not only would he probably not be acquitted but, under the system which has been operating since December, 1958 (a few months after De Gaulle came to power), his book could disappear from public knowledge. The title Madame Bovary would become an undesirable phrase, and any attempt to print or display the book would render the offender liable to prosecution. There is every reason to believe also that Celine’s Voyage au bout de la unit would not survive, and even Ulysses in English would not escape expurgation in Paris, since it could be suppressed by a law covering “all writings of foreign origin susceptible of troubling public order.”

Every country has a residue of obsolete or eccentric laws which it rarely draws upon; France, particularly in recent months, has been using its eccentric laws erratically, unreasonably, and even ruthlessly, to such an extent that publishers — Catholic and nondenominational, avant-garde and fashionable — have seriously considered strike action to draw attention to the menace hanging over them.

In recent months a number of books have been stigmatized as pornographic by a commission whose activities come under the jurisdiction of the Minister for the Interior. The commission operates administratively: no one knows how the members reach their conclusions; there are no editors or publishers on the commission; and the members are not obliged to justify their decisions publicly. Jurisprudence has no authority in the matter.

Paris publishers have repeatedly appealed to the Minister for the Interior to come to some reasonable terms on this matter. The bland response is that books are not banned, they are only forbidden to be put within reach of children.

It is true that the commission is operating under a law of July 16, 1949, covering “publications destined for children and adolescents,” which was introduced primarily to protect French youth from the flood of sex-and-sadism American comics which inundated France in the immediate post-war period. But in December, 1958, the Gaullist regime considerably aggravated the risks run by publishers by actually enforcing a clause in the law of 1949 which covered “all writings which present a danger to youth because of their licentious or pornographic character.” Adults are still not forbidden to purchase or read such books. But another clause in the law denies the right to expose the offending publications to the public view either on the exterior or in the interior of a bookshop or kiosk. And no form of publicity is permitted.

The titles may not even be included in a publisher’s list. Although adults are permitted to buy these books, how are they going to find out that they exist? This is clearly the most effective way of not merely banning but annihilating a book, while keeping up the fiction that there is no censorship. The authorities are so sensitive that one is liable to prosecution for saying that there is a censor. A short time ago Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a Paris publisher, decided to see how strictly the Minister for the Interior was prepared to enforce the letter of the law. On the dust jacket of one of his books he indicated the existence of Les Larmes d’ Eros, a philosophical work by the far from frivolous Georges Bataille which is illustrated by reproductions of works of art and which had incurred the displeasure of the commission. Pauvert simply printed Georges Bataille’s name on the dust jacket, and in place of the title of the book there was an asterisk referring the reader to a footnote which explained that “the blank title is the work of the censor.”

Pauvert was prosecuted because the dust jacket was held to be publicity and because he had said that there was a censor when officially there is no censor. Fortunately, a Paris tribunal threw out the charges without more ado.

WHAT French publishers are facing is not just the danger of losing a book or two, but total extinction. The law states that once a firm has had three books banned during the course of a year further publications must be submitted to the Minister for the Interior three months before publication date. At the end of this period the publisher must look in the current Journal Officiel to find out whether or not one of his books is banned.

It is hard not to believe in the deliberate bad faith of the minister when one discovers that the publisher is not allowed to submit a manuscript to the Minister for the Interior. Instead, he must take the costly risk of printing an edition and then wait three months to see if he is going to suffer a complete loss. Before the publisher can sell a single copy his printing fees fall due.

The effect of this kind of threat is naturally to make publishers extremely circumspect about putting anything into print. It could result in a breed of timorous and ultraconservative French publishers.

One publisher, Maurice Girodias, is, to all intents and purposes, already out of business. He is existing on borrowed time by carrying on through appeal courts long-drawn-out and expensive battles which he has no chance of winning.

A monthly magazine, Olympia, which he began producing last year, has to be submitted to the Minister for the Interior each month, and Girodias must wait three months to see if it will be banned. It generally is, but this magazine, which is in English, has been accepted as decent by the United States and British customs.

Girodias has run into trouble partly because he has a way of irritating the administration — for example, by taking actions for damages against the Minister for the Interior, which he never wins — and partly because, although we are indebted to him for publishing such books as Beckett’s Watt, Nabokov’s Lolita. and the works of Genet and Donleavy, he also publishes books which he frankly admits could be called pornographic.

In the January issue of the excellent Paris magazine Preuves he gave a hilarious account of his encounters with the censor. He was of course prosecuted and fined lor writing this article, entitled “La Censure et moi.”

It was because many publishers did not want to be associated publicly with the defense of a colleague who could be said to be a little less than extremely respectable that things were allowed to go so far. But last November the situation took an alarming turn. The respectable, prosperous, and highly commercial firm of Gallimard, to its horror, had a book banned. Then came the turn of Julliard, an equally respected and prosperous firm, and later that of La Table Ronde, whose $100 de Malentendu, a translation of a novel by an American, Robert Cover, was banned.

It now became clear that the mysterious commission was not going to restrict itself to small firms or books intended for children. None of the books involved was intended for youth. None could be said to be pornographic. The publishers began to realize that they might very easily find themselves in the position of the near-bankruptcy of Girodias.

Christian Bourgois, a director of Julliard, told me recently that he was profoundly convinced that the activities of the ministry have nothing to do with the protection of youth, but are clearly an attempt to intimidate publishers. “If these books undermine good morals.” he said, “then let them bring us to trial. But that does not happen, the book is simply banned. If I wrote erotic passages into a child’s book, then certainly I would be misrepresenting my merchandise and deserve prosecution. But our books are not for children.

“Many of the methods employed now,” he went on, “were used to suppress books which embarrassed the government during the Algerian war. We were always shocked of course when newspapers and books were seized then, but the truth is that we got used to it. The danger is that this kind of activity will enter into the moeurs of our society.”

Early this year the authorities attempted to go even further: there was a project to introduce a law which would give a policeman authority to seize any book. This caused such an outcry that it was temporarily abandoned.

Then the Maspero case in April of this year showed how far the authorities were willing to go.

Francois Maspero, a thirty-year-old bookseller in the Latin Quarter, was charged with having sought to corrupt the morals of youth by putting pornographic books within their reach. He was tried, convicted, and fined by a tribunal of three judges. This serious offense carries penalties of from one month to one year in prison and fines ranging from $200 to $3000. He was actually fined only $60. But the implication of such a conviction was that Maspero had been carrying on a trade in dirty books which he was selling to adolescents and even to young children. It was clear that most respectable people would think twice about going into a bookshop run by this young man, and the case was a warning to booksellers throughout the country who had thought of stocking those books now publicly branded pornographic. After the trial Maspero told me that the experience was like being convicted of having taken his pants off in public.

But this allegedly disgusting young man was defended by one of France’s most eminent lawyers, Maurice Garçon, a member of the Académie Française. And a number of the most respected publishers of the country — Paul Flamand, a director of the Catholic Éditions de Seuil; Jerome Lindon, Beckett’s publisher; and Bourgois of Julliard —signed a petition in his favor. One of the character witnesses for the defense was a Dominican priest.

From the very start there was no way by which Maspero could be acquitted. The judges, incredibly, were not allowed to concern themselves with the contents of the books in question. They were simply working on a list of titles in the Journal Officiel supplied by the commission, which operates, as we saw, independently of jurisprudence. Nobody denied that Maspero had in his shop some books forbidden to children but available for adults. But he was convicted in spite of the fact that the books could not reasonably be said to have been put within reach of children, since one of them, Georges Bataille’s book, costs $24, and the cheapest, $2, and in addition they were locked out of reach in a showcase. Maspero, a very serious young man who is considered by his colleagues to be slightly puritanical, did not wish these books to fall into the hands of young people, although respected British bookshops saw no objection to displaying them openly. Apart from the Bataille work, there was L’Erotisme au cinema, a collection of film stills, and the Métaphysique du Strip-tease, erotic certainly, but not pornographic. But the official climate of Paris is now such that this kind of book is considered to be very objectionable.

Maspero tells how one of the policemen raiding his shop, seeing a book entitled Sexual Symbols, warned him paternally that he should be careful about such books, that the title alone was pornographic and could earn him a $1000 fine. This conscientious civil servant clearly uses the word “pornographic” in a rather generous free-for-all way.

There is another side to the Maspero affair. During the Algerian war Maspero stubbornly insisted upon selling books like Henri Alleg’s La Question and La Gangrene, which exposed cases of torturing by the police and the army. He was raided more than one hundred times, charged fourteen times, but never brought to trial because of what a court case could bring to light, since the allegations made in the books were, as we all know now, perfectly true. Maspero feels that the police paid special attention to him because they felt it would be useful if they were able to point out that here was the man who was selling banned books during the Algerian war, still peddling banned books. As if it were all done in the same spirit.

Maspero is now worried about what might befall some of the books in the sociological and psychological sections of his bookshop. Such authors as Margaret Mead and Freud may be banned.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of how Paris, of all cities, found itself in the grip of a puritanical wave. Madame de Gaulle, straying to an unaccustomed corner of a respectable British bookshop in Paris, is supposed to have been horrified to find herself face-to-face with a display of erotic books. The vague de pudeur was on.

Presuming that the authorities are sincere in trying to protect youth, are they going about it efficiently? While no youth under eighteen is allowed to know of the existence of the Metaphysique du Strip-tease, any schoolboy coming home from the Lycée Montaigne can look as long as he likes at the stills of stripping girls in showcases outside the clubs at Vavin. Or children can wander around Pigalle at any time of the day or night and find, covering the walls of innumerable clubs, pictures of nudes. If a schoolboy cannot afford $24 for Georges Bataille’s Les Larmes d’Eros, he can spend five cents on the France-Soir any night and see the celebrated figures of history (even Richelieu) clawing the clothes off demure ladies in the strip cartoon “Les Amours Célèbres.” Or for twenty cents anyone can indulge in the shallow titillation of “Ici Paris.” But in such cases the censorship commission would be coming up against powerful newspaper trusts, the tourist trade, and, of course, gangsters.

Then there are curious anomalies: Raymond Queneau, the author of Zazie in the Métro and himself a director of a publishing house, had his scenario for a film called Un Couple published. It was banned, and the title was suppressed. But at the same time, the film was running openly in Paris with the same title and dialogue. The English version of Lolita was banned in France while it was circulating freely in the United States and Britain; but it was also circulating freely in France in a French translation brought out by Gallimard. This is a curious state of affairs.

But these recent developments have more serious implications: they have much more to do with authority than with morals. When De Gaulle goes on one of his periodic tours of his dominion, and in the famous cheese district of Cantal, for example, says, “Ici vous faites du bon frontage” (which he did say), one has the distinct feeling that he is not so much indulging in careless talk as issuing a royal edict. One’s attitude to Cantal cheese can perhaps become a test of one’s patriotism. A young man watching the President pass down a Paris boulevard suggested in a loud voice that it was time he retired. The young man explained to the police that he was simply reminding the President of a fact known to all, that the President had passed the retiring age. Yet he was charged with insulting the head of state. Recently, the number of such cases has increased, which does not necessarily mean that people are doing this kind of thing more than they used to, but that the action is now considered as an offense.

Even more ominous, in May a number of journalists, both right-wing and left-wing, published a manifesto for the “defense of the freedom of the press,” in which they complained of the “systematic and arbitrary repression” of political news and reported that in the preceding weeks newspaper managers, cartoonists, writers, and publishers had been charged with insulting the head of state in articles or cartoons which (this group claimed) merely expressed opinion.

The new regime in France seems to be breeding a climate of solemn self-satisfaction, of self-righteousness, and of intolerance. The authoritarian state requires its citizens to be docile, and it is useful to be able to make outcasts of those who do not conform. The surest way of keeping the population docile is to limit the means by which the intellectuals can agitate. It is no coincidence that in the past most of the great names of modern literature, from Joyce in the twenties to Baldwin in the fifties, chose Paris as a place to live part of their lives. Liberalism was official. They found in the free atmosphere of the city an escape from the social intimidation, the oppressive puritanism, or the intellectual timidity of their own communities. They found a place to grow. There is a real danger that Paris may soon no longer be such a city.