Editorial/Muggeridge at 80, Mitterrand at Figaro
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL MUGGERIDGE AT 80, MITTERRAND AT FIGARO by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. JuONDON—Here in Europe, having just concluded a long series of meetings with distinguished politicians and writers, this...
...I am in doubt...
...Free expression is fundamental to our intellectual and political life...
...Even his indictment was irregular, for Audinot is a member of France's legislative body, and to indict a French Deputy voting procedures must be followed in the National Assembly that in Audinot's case were ignored...
...The founders did not want to establish a nation of meek people practicing self-censorship...
...The plague of litigious do-gooders loose in the Republic is a constant peril to free expression, and the prospects become genuinely alarming when one considers all those hungry lawyers coming out of our superabundant law schools plus all those hungry graduates of our superabundant journalism schools who in their eagerness for a headline give the enemies of the First Amendment delectable opportunities for mischief...
...In our own country fear of libeling do-gooders and corporate mullahs is obviously muzzling free expression...
...The Nader case is not unique...
...Now the courts are onto him all, Audinot protests, because of politics...
...Moreover Le Figaro's books are now under the scrutiny of government tax inspectors...
...Boisterously using his freedom to the fullest over some five decades, he has moved from a flirtation with Marxism to a singularly vigilant and intelligent anti-Communism...
...The contrasting conditions of Britain's Malcolm Muggeridge and of France's Andre Audinot, president of Figaro Co., publisher of the Paris daily Figaro, have reminded me of the usefulness and fragility of free expression even in the West...
...Audinot is not nearly so eloquent or high spirited as Muggeridge, but he is eager to tell those he invites to dine at his table of how he believes the government is harassing him for his newspaper's assaults on its policies...
...Many Americans have delighted in Muggeridge's ebullient iconoclasm in his many books and, until some years ago, his regular Esquire magazine columns...
...A Socialist plan to change tax laws will weaken the paper still more...
...There were television appearances, newspaper and magazine articles, an eloquent telegram from Ronald Reagan, and on March 25 an exuberant band of journalists from the Left and the Right feted him at the high-toned Garrick Club...
...Nat Hentoff, author of The First Freedom, warns of the increasing threat to free expression owing to journalists' fear of libel...
...Ralph Nader pursued the independent journalist Ralph de Tol-edano with a million-dollar libel suit for seven years owing to one errant sentence in a de Toledano column...
...My inquiries in Paris supported his charges...
...JuONDON—Here in Europe, having just concluded a long series of meetings with distinguished politicians and writers, this Yank journalist has been made to sit up and twitch...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Audinot is being powerfully squeezed...
...It might assure us more Muggeridges and fewer Audinots...
...Muggeridge's has been a gorgeous drama, all eighty years of it lived with verve and eloquence that I can report to you remain undiminished...
...But a far more frequent menace to free expression in the West is the smug do-gooder who bears uplifting slogans and the promise of reform and good government...
...He supports the position of the ACLU, i.e., that all expressions about public issues be immune from libel laws...
...He has already had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in his defense...
...France's government controls much of the advertisement revenue available to news media and it controls the banks...
...Death and eternity," the old rascal told his audience at the Garrick Club, and in celebrating the Reaper's allures he has again selected the perfect dead cat to heave onto the laps of the complacent...
...Yet are those rights all that secure...
...It was meant to end control of the French press by Nazi collaborators after World War II...
...We all expect the enemies of freedom to wear uniforms and carry truncheons...
...Meanwhile in Paris, Audinot was consulting lawyers and accountants...
...Other French newspaper owners have ignored it and never been prosecuted, but Audinot has been indicted and, he says, warned to come to terms with the Socialists...
...Who will criticize Nader after that...
...Yet even as Muggeridge's drama is an illustration of the value of free expression, Audinot's drama is an illustration of freedom's fragility...
...Last month while Audinot was battling with the Socialist government to keep his paper and his freedom Muggeridge was being celebrated throughout the London media on the occasion of his 80th birthday...
...What next...
...And, after a lifetime of skepticism, last November he turned himself over to Roman Catholicism...
...The law is about as vital for contemporary French life as those archaic laws against spitting and swearing still on the books in some American cities...
...How can this be...
...He has hilariously railed at do-gooders and fatuous members of the bourgeoisie alike...
...He is one of the monuments to free expression that Western journalists can look to for inspiration...
...France's Socialist president speaks of social justice and a new dawn for the French workers...
...journalists have come to accept our First Amendment rights as sacrosanct and immutable...
...Well, I for one am made jumpy by politicians who shout for social justice...
...Now the government has disinterred an obscure law never before used or elaborated upon so that, Audinot believes, its friends will be able to gain control of the other anti-government Hersant paper in Paris, France-Soir...
...His paper is one of the two major Paris dailies controlled by Robert Hersant, a communications tycoon whose urban and rural newspapers are read by one of every five Frenchmen...
...Le Figaro now faces loss of ad revenue from government sources...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
