Countering obstacles to artistic freedom of creation and dissemination

Interrupting a performance or exerting pressure to prevent it from taking place, stealing books from a library and burning them, daubing graffiti on a bookshop window, or vandalising a visual artist’s exhibition because one takes issue with its feminist content… Restrictions on the freedoms of creation and dissemination are now evident across all artistic disciplines. This is an alarming situation about which the Senate had already sounded the alarm in a recent report evaluating the Law on Freedom of Creation, Architecture and Heritage (LCAP).
In recent years, the forms of obstruction have multiplied and have increasingly turned to physical and digital violence. Protest no longer takes place in a calm and respectful manner towards works and artists; it seeks to terrorise and obstruct. Venues are facing extreme acts of vandalism, such as the feminist exhibition ‘Benzine Cyprine’ in Nîmes, which was savagely ransacked, with 90% of the photographs destroyed and trampled underfoot. In Paris, the Violette and Co bookshop has been subjected to a violent intimidation campaign, coupled with homophobic and Islamophobic graffiti on its shopfront. Online, massive cyberbullying campaigns are being orchestrated to destroy works and threaten artists.
This phenomenon is all the more worrying given the diversification of the perpetrators’ profiles. Whilst until recently, those carrying out acts of obstruction mainly claimed affiliation with far-right movements, today their profiles have diversified: activist groups (feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ+), parents’ groups, as well as elected representatives of all political persuasions and prefects no longer hesitate to interfere in programming or to use public funds as a means of financial blackmail.
This constant hostility has major and destructive consequences for culture. Out of fear, many artists practise self-censorship, and cultural programming becomes sanitised, leading to a dramatic loss of artistic diversity. Beyond the works themselves, it is lives that are being undermined: victims face death threats even in their private lives, which can lead to people abandoning their careers and suffering deep trauma. Yet, there is currently no dedicated public space to give a voice to these victims and provide them with support.
Whilst there are as yet no official national statistics to quantify the exact scale of the phenomenon, the warning issued by the entire cultural sector is unequivocal. Inaction is no longer an option, for it is democracy itself that is directly under threat.