Charlie Hebdo Cartoon in Crans-Montana: Controversy & Context

This film phenomenon actually consists of three films. The first, “Les Bronzés” (German title: “The Strandflitzer”), was devised by a theater collective of school friends and directed in 1978 by the (then not yet) well-known filmmaker Patrice Leconte: It is unabashedly and maliciously about a group of tourists in a holiday camp on the Ivory Coast, their embarrassments and misadventures. The success encouraged a sequel – the film “Les Bronzés font du ski” (“Sun, Sex and Snowstorms”), to which the cartoon alludes. Individual quotes from it even entered popular culture in the country. A late sequel in 2006 ultimately attracted over ten million visitors to the cinemas, making it one of the most popular films ever.

At least most older French people immediately knew what the title of the cartoon about the accident in Crans-Montana refers to. But the 52-year-old illustrator Eric Salch, who comes from the Parisian banlieues and is notorious and popular for his wild humor, probably had even more in mind.

His work on the comic series “Pop Corn”, which appeared once a week in the newspaper “Le Monde”, has already shown that he is familiar with films. Apparently he also knows forgotten details about the making of the film “Sun, Sex and Snowstorms”, whose title he alludes to. The theater ensemble actually had something completely different planned at the time.

A macabre black comedy about Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya Flight 571. In 1972, a plane crashed in the Andes, 16 of the 45 occupants survived after 72 days in the ice – they had become cannibals and fed on the flesh of the dead. At that time, the opinion prevailed that such a misfortune was not the stuff of jokes – and so we ended up with a ski adventure joke.

So when Eric Salch alludes to this film, he is probably also alluding to the other one that was never made – and thus also to the question: Must there be limits to breaking taboos in jokes and satire? This invisible context of the Crans Montana caricature does not yet answer the question of how one should evaluate this caricature, aesthetically and morally. But it should also count, not just the feelings of recipients.

Legislation is increasingly following the idea that “people have a right not to feel uncomfortable,” complained the lawyer for the German satirical magazine “Titanic,” Gabriele Rittig, recently in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung.” The magazine “Charlie Hebdo” lost most of its editorial team in an Islamist terrorist attack as a result of its Mohammed caricatures. Which magazine, if not this one, can expect an audience to feel uncomfortable?