France blurs the line between comedy and crime Even those who find Dieudonné"s views vile may be reluctant to enforce the laws against them The Republic won," said interior minister Manuel Valls after a decision of France's Conseil d'Etat to ban a performance by comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala in Nantes on Thursday night. The republic cannot afford many more such victories. France's problem with anti-Semitism, festering for more than a decade, is becoming increasingly serious. The country's laws deserve part of the blame. Dieudonné (he is known by his first name) may be the most gifted French comedian of his generation. He has made his name writing, directing, singing and acting two-hour-long combinations of skits and stand-up at his own Théâtre de la Main d'Or in Paris. His histrionic and imitative gifts are extraordinary, permitting him to carry out, for instance, both sides of an absurdist dialogue between a television intellectual and a car-burning rioter in the banlieues. Son of a Cameroonian father and a Breton mother, he has long been fascinated by ethnicity, identity and allegiance. That used to be a strength, but over the past decade his shows have been increasingly given over to the mockery, baiting and insulting of Jews. He has invited Holocaust sceptic Robert Faurisson on stage, wearing a yarmulke. He has invented a singalong ditty called Shoah-Nanas ("Holocaust-Pineapple") that features a young man dancing in the uniform of a concentration-camp inmate. And he has popularised a gesture called the quenelle ("dumpling"), which involves grasping one's stiffened arm with the other hand, as if to prevent it from shooting upward in an involuntary Nazi salute. Dieudonné has denied this interpretation, but you can forgive French authorities their scepticism. His fans post photos of themselves online doing the quenelle in front of Jewish sites: a Paris synagogue; the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, where a terrorist killed three children in 2012; Auschwitz. The quenelle is acquiring a following. Nicolas Anelka, from the UK's West Bromwich Albion football team, did one after a goal last month. Other French athletes (footballers Mamadou Sakho of Liverpool and Samir Nasri of Manchester City, and Tony Parker from Texas's San Antonio Spurs basketball team) have been pictured making the gesture with Dieudonné. In other photos, French soldiers do it, two of them in front of a synagogue. Dieudonné has reportedly registered the trademarks "Quenelle" and "Quenelle+." With Dieudonné scheduled to begin a national tour in Nantes on Thursday, the French authorities sought ways to stop it. On Monday Mr Valls sent out a circular outlining several ways to do so. President François Hollande called on authorities to be "vigilant and inflexible" in defending the principles of the Republic. For anyone raised in a different constitutional tradition, it is not clear what principles he means. The authorities seem to have protected one republican principle (anti-racism) at the expense of another (free speech). In most western countries, people are entitled to their opinions, even false and obnoxious ones. Only when they resort to violence or incitement can legal authorities hit them like a tonne of bricks. France finds this hard to do; it is paying for a terrible legislative mistake made in the wake of the cold war. In 1990 it passed the Gayssot law, which made it a crime to deny or minimise the Holocaust. This might seem a reasonable measure that curtailed the rights of only a few malevolent cranks, but it quickly proved problematic. It made bigots look like tribunes of free speech. And it created a "competition of victims." A traditional, conservative country - one that draws its rules of right conduct from the specific lessons of its own history - might justify such a law. You could simply look at the damage anti-Semitism has done to France and act to prevent it on those grounds. But by 1990 France was turning into a different kind of country, one that drew its rules not from history but from abstract, neutral notions of rights. In this new, ahistorical France, special treatment of the Holocaust was resented. Other memorial laws were passed concerning the Armenian genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism - and, two years ago, the penalties attached to the Gayssot law were extended to other crimes. The result is perverse. France's penal code is now such a minefield of proscribed opinions that even people who find Dieudonné"s views vile might be reluctant to enforce the laws against them. Comforting an audience by belittling others is a technique common to comedians and tyrants. Dieudonné has called Holocaust commemorations "memorial pornography." He has described Marshal Philippe Pétain, who ruled Nazi-occupied France, "less racist" than Mr Hollande. Are those opinions or crimes? France is going to need a better way to distinguish between the two.