-Freedom of speech is a crazy idea.

-When do we want it?!

-The notion that people should be allowed to say things that seem disgusting or blasphemous or seditious or bigoted or hateful, this is deeply antithetical to who we are as human beings.

And the only thing going for this loony idea is that it's also the most successful social idea of all time, bar none.

-Freedom of expression.

It's not just the words that come out of your mouth.

It's the books you read.

It's what you wear.

-Free speech, it's absolutely unnatural.

The first impulse is to self-censor because it's dangerous.

[ Gunshots ] -An urgent manhunt for the two gunmen responsible for the terror attack that stunned Paris.

-If I see him, who did the cartoon about Muhammad, if I see him, I'll kill him.

-When you believe in different things, then you will have conflicts.

-If people are afraid to run ideas past each other, they can't move forward.

-These gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian.

-And if you tell somebody, "You can't talk about this," I think that's censorship.

-All ideas should be subject to criticism because no one is infallible.

-Genetics was banned because it was fake science.

-"Who are these two doctors there?

We've never heard of them."

They couldn't really admit that they had been on the wrong track.

-Whether it's scientific, religious, the more free we can make the conversation among human beings, the better off we'll be.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Free speech.

It's essential for social change and progress, and that includes science and religion, areas where human understanding and beliefs are frequently at odds, where thinking can, and often does, become dogmatic.

So how does free expression shape those areas of our lives?

Throughout my career as lawyer, law professor, and past president of the ACLU, I've seen that the right to free speech is essential for exercising every other right and that censorship is the greatest threat to those rights.

Free and open discourse is important not only for reconciling conflicts between religion and science, but also within science itself.

-It's a real problem with science, that in theory, it's open to changing its mind.

The whole point of science is you change your mind if the facts change.

But in practice, science often behaves more like religion in this respect.

If you say, "On this, we know we're right," and you can't deviate from the right view and you therefore prevent free speech in the form of disagreement, then you prevent scientific advance.

The story of Barry Marshall and stomach ulcers is a very good example of dogma getting in the way of scientific progress.

[ Film reel whirring ] -Now, there it is, Steve, that irregular bulge there.

You've got a duodenal ulcer.

-Duodenal ulcer?

-The commonest type.

-It used to be that 10% of everybody in the United States would get an ulcer at some time in their life.

-They come to the unlucky guy with a nervous system that pumps acid into his stomach, even when there isn't any food there to digest.

-A stomach ulcer is a little hole in the lining of the stomach, can be quite painful, and, potentially, some of them can get quite bad.

-For decades, thousands of Americans had been bleeding to death from severe stomach ulcers every year.

-Because people didn't know the cause of ulcers, they said it's caused by too much acid, and the reason you have too much acid is because you're under stress.

Nobody bothered to look for another cause.

-In 1981, pathologist Robin Warren made a life-changing discovery.

-Normally, if people had any kind of stomach problem, you would put the fiber-optic endoscope with a little camera on it and look around in the stomach to see if people had an ulcer.

But Dr. Warren took some biopsy samples, looked at them under the microscope, and he started seeing these bacteria in the stomach.

The weird thing was that all the medical books said bacteria could not live in the stomach because there's so much acid there.

-The major difficulties that I had at the time were that no one -- well, basically, that no one believed in me.

And then Barry Marshall walked into my room and asked to see what I was doing.

And since he was the only person who'd ever shown any real interest in what I was doing, I showed him.

[ Laughter ] -He said to me, you know, "There seems to be bacteria in the stomach.

What do they mean?"

It was only a year later that when we looked at our data on about 100 people that we could say, "You know, there might be something here.

Everybody with ulcers has got these bacteria, and nobody noticed them before.

Maybe the bacteria damages the lining of the stomach, and then the acid eats a hole in it.

That would make sense."

-The doctors' discovery of the Helicobacter pylori bacteria could change the way stomach ulcers were treated -- with antibiotics instead of acid blockers.

-In the '80s when we started, everyone with ulcers was being put on these acid blocker tablets.

Most gastroenterologists and physicians, they had gone from having virtually no treatment for ulcers to having the acid blockers.

So as far as they were concerned, these drugs were magical.

The problem was that they did not cure you.

They would just heal the ulcer, and if you stopped taking the treatment, a month later, your ulcer would come back.

The big pharmaceutical companies could see that it was a gold mine, so by 1987, actually, they were selling $5 billion worth of the main drugs.

A friend of mine coined the term "acid mafia."

So, everyone was so focused on acid and acid blockers, they couldn't really admit that they had been on the wrong track.

Robin and I had been doing this work for a couple of years and we were starting to get pretty interested, so we submitted our initial research paper to the Australian Gastroenterology meeting, and it was rejected.

I did present it a year later, and still, nobody believed it.

"Who are these two doctors there?

We've never heard of them.

This is strange stuff.

I'm going to reject it."

People were standing up in the audience, saying, "Barry, you've got this wrong."

-When he tried to say it at conferences or publish it in scientific journals, the allergic reaction among the scientific establishment was very strong.

-In order to be taken seriously, Marshall and Warren needed to prove that H. pylori bacteria caused ulcers in live animals.

-We tried it on guinea pigs and pigs and rabbits and rats.

No luck.

They were immune to these bacteria, so we decided to do a human experiment.

And after some discussion with Dr. Warren, we decided that I was going to be the guinea pig.

I had to see if a healthy person could be infected.

I took the bacteria from a patient who had gastritis, or inflammation in the stomach, cultured the bacteria.

It was a Tuesday morning in July 1984.

I drank a thousand million of these bacteria.

♪♪ I kind of felt unwell for a few days, then I started throwing up each morning.

I had this bad breath, and I was not sleeping.

I was breaking out in sweats.

So we put the scope down and took some biopsies, and sure enough, I had a very, very thick infection with these bacteria in the stomach.

And on the biopsy, we saw exactly the kind of inflammation that we saw in the ulcer patients.

-It was that self-experimentation, which was a brave and painful thing to do, that eventually began to persuade the world that he was right.

[ Applause ] -In 2005, the same scientific community that had rejected their findings honored Marshall and Warren with the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

-Against prevailing dogmas, you discovered that one of the most common and important diseases of mankind now can be permanently cured by antibiotics, to the benefit of millions of patients.

[ Applause ] -"Finally" could be added.

The work that is awarded was performed more than 20 years ago.

-20 years.

So, is that a long time?

Too long, but compared to how long ideas, bad ideas, hang around, it's the blink of an eye.

Science makes its mistakes incredibly quickly.

I mean, it throws up millions of hypotheses every day, the vast majority of which will be wrong.

And then it finds its mistakes incredibly quickly.

It sorts through those haystacks to find those needles, and then circulate those needles through the community and then do it all again the next day.

-Someone else who hates you has to do the experiment and get the same result.

And they say, "Well, I used to hate that theory, but I tested it out, and it really seems to be true."

You can look at the evidence and the way it was collected and the way it was proven or disproven, and you can say, "You know, that seems believable."

-We now have hundreds of years of accumulated objective knowledge.

Now, some of that will turn out to be wrong.

Anything that's settled can be unsettled in liberal science.

That's one of its core principles.

It's called fallibilism.

You might always be wrong.

That's why we need free speech.

-The quest for knowledge and understanding is often at odds with religious interpretation.

When religious dogma punishes new lines of inquiry, it interferes with human enlightenment in both religion and science.

-As Cicero said, Socrates was the man who brought philosophy from Heaven to Earth, and he paid for it with his own life.

He is the major philosophical hero in all history.

He challenges almost everything.

-He was willing to hear anybody and let them speak their mind freely, and, "Let's discuss what you think."

-What do you think that justice is?

What do you think should be done about this or that?

What's your opinion, and how can you support your opinion?

He was a controversial figure, and when Socrates started discussing about the nature of gods, that alarmed the Athenian citizens.

-There were many young people who were drawn to him because they found his ideas quite groundbreaking.

-But he simply had a different idea about what divine is and what our relationship with it should be.

-Quite off-putting to many conservative, well-to-do Athenians.

-At the end of the fifth century, there has been a great war between Athens and Sparta.

Athens lost the war.

-Things weren't looking good for the city, so they had to blame somebody for the social turmoil.

-Well, the official charges against him was that he was disrespectful to gods and that he corrupted the youth.

-Socrates was condemned to be executed by drinking a small cup of hemlock.

-Plato describes in much detail the symptoms -- Paralysis of the respiratory muscles and the feeling of cold, starting from the limbs, progressing towards the lungs and the heart.

-Apparently, during his last minutes, Socrates was quite peaceful and serene, surrounded by his loved ones.

The image we have is of the famous painting by David.

We know that some of his students were crying.

He started losing control of his limbs and slowly faded away.

-We do have 25 centuries of Socratic legacy, and it started right away after his death, and it never stopped.

With Socrates, we really begin to examine the fundamental questions about our own lives, about our actions, our decisions, our own thoughts, but also about the world around us, the sky and the stars, the nature of the physical world.

♪♪ -Free speech is essential to progress because progress depends on being able to float ideas out there and see what happens to them.

It doesn't mean that most ideas are good ideas.

In fact, quite the contrary -- Most ideas are bad ideas.

But unless you have the ability to voice ideas, you'll never hit on the correct ones.

-Here in the heart of Florence, the Galileo Museum houses artifacts from the earliest days of modern science -- instruments and tools that help us understand the natural world.

And no tool is more significant than this one -- a finger that belonged to Galileo Galilei.

-This has a poem explaining that this was the finger that Galileo used to point at the stars.

This is the one that opened the way to new things in science.

-[ Speaking Italian ] -Galileo's experiments affected and demolished an entire construction of knowledge, moral and religious values that had persisted for centuries.

-This instrument is a big model of the cosmos according to Aristotle and Ptolemy.

What you can see here is seven sphere of the planets, all going around the Earth that is still at the center.

This was the structure of the universe accepted by the Church.

-Science absolutely depends upon the ability to disagree with dogma.

To have the conversations about science, you need to be able to express your mind freely, to say, "I don't think the Sun goes around the Earth.

I think the Earth goes around the Sun."

And if you get burnt at the stake or tried for blasphemy for saying that, then it inhibits science greatly, as Galileo found out.

-Galileo didn't set out to disprove thousand-year-old dogma.

He was a steadfast Catholic.

But in 1609, he built a tool that changed everything.

-These are the only two existing telescope made by Galileo and preserved up to now.

When Galileo pointed at Jupiter, he discovered four small stars around the planet, and they were moving around Jupiter.

There was another center of rotation in the planetary system.

-[ Speaking Italian ] -The discovery of the satellites of Jupiter inspired complete rethinking of astronomy, introducing the theme of plurality in the rotation of celestial bodies, meaning not just one, the Earth, at the center of the universe.

-Nearly 40 years earlier, in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

When Galileo discovered four of Jupiter's moons, that provided concrete support for the Copernican model.

In 1610, Galileo published his findings.

-[ Speaking Italian ] -This is a copy of the 1665 "Sidereus Nuncius."

Galileo reports, as though in a diary, the movements of the Jupiter stars and satellites that he calls the Medicean planets around the main body of Jupiter.

All foundation within the field of anthropological, ethical, and religious thinking are lost.

Man is no longer at the center, but within the cosmos.

He is just a spot scattered in an infinite universe.

♪♪ -Galileo continued to argue that heliocentrism did not contradict the Bible, that his findings and his faith could co-exist.

But the Vatican disagreed and accused Galileo of heresy.

-[ Speaking Italian ] -Galileo bowed to the Church's bidding, and renounced in 1633, disclaiming and denying the truth of the Copernican system.

-Galileo's home in Florence still stands.

The Vatican Inquisition sentenced him to house arrest here for the remainder of his life.

This was the Church's attempt to forever silence the man we now recognize as the father of modern science, but they failed.

Galileo and his contemporaries left behind the works that preserved their discoveries.

Imagine if, instead of being silenced, Galileo had been allowed to argue his case before the public without fear of reprisal.

And what if the Church had countered his arguments in a similar fashion?

How could the wealth of information on the Internet today come to be without a free and open exchange of ideas?

In 1747, French publishers launched a project to gather all the world's knowledge in one place.

This monumental task was taken up by one man.

He was a philosopher, mathematician, chemist, art critic, and author.

His name -- Denis Diderot.

-This is the first edition of the encyclopedia, the original one.

I like to show the frontispiece, which is a beautiful engraving, and it shows the truth being unveiled.

-[ Speaking French ] -It is said of the encyclopedia, and it's correct to say so, that it is the monument of the Enlightenment.

-He wanted to create a tool of discovery, an instrument for people to learn how to think by themselves.

-It really wasn't until the Enlightenment that people thought we shouldn't stop the flow of information -- This freedom of speech is a good thing for human development.

-Free speech really comes out of the democratic and scientific revolution that happened together.

The two of them grew up together, and they really both shared a concept of freedom.

-The freedom to be wrong, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to try again.

These are vital to the innovation process.

-The idea was no longer that you would get knowledge from above in science.

You would not get knowledge from the deity or from the spokespeople of the deity, which would largely be the Church, but rather that you yourself would go out and get knowledge, find knowledge, develop knowledge.

-[ Speaking French ] -Diderot was one of the first to be truly interested in the passing on of knowledge that we would call technical or technological knowledge today.

This is to say, showing how things are made.

-In this volume, there is a section about making pins.

It's a very humble subject, and I don't think that any other book before them paid so much attention to trades that could be considered as modest, humble, too small to be explained.

♪♪ -Diderot enlisted the aid of many of the great minds of France -- experts in art, mathematics, and science.

-It was a collective endeavor, very characteristic of the Enlightenment.

People are talking with each other through the entries.

-Most progress does not occur in the mind of one genius, right?

It occurs because of an interactive dialog between people, and typically between a lot of people.

-Communities of people pooling their discoveries, criticizing one another's claims, poking holes in their arguments, flaws in their logic.

-A giant hive mind of millions and millions of the smartest people on the planet talking to each other, creating knowledge.

And anyone can come along anywhere and apply themselves to a problem and change that matrix.

It's humanity's greatest creation.

Well, it all depends on not having authorities step in and say, "Wait a minute, here's the answer."

-[ Speaking French ] -The encyclopedia was up against censure both by the Church and by the political system, and it was banned twice.

-One of the articles that was really considered really scandalous from the very beginning, it's an article written by Diderot about political authority.

It begins, "No man has received from nature the right to order others."

-[ Speaking French ] -The Kingdom of France is a monarchy of divine right.

So calling into question religion is calling into question the king, and calling into question the king is calling into question religion.

-It was very daring.

Very, very daring.

-Publishing proceeded anonymously under a fictitious Swiss address.

In France, the Encyclopédie attracted allies in some very unexpected places.

-There is a famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour with several volumes of the encyclopedia on her table.

Her apartment at the very palace of the King, when the encyclopedia was being banned, she had it.

In 1759, when there is even a public burning of the book, the police is sent to seize the manuscripts, and Diderot is saved by the very person who is ordering that police visit.

The director of the library warns Diderot in advance and offers to hide the material of the Encyclopédie in his own rooms.

-In 1765, Diderot completed his Encyclopédie -- 28 volumes with more than 70,000 articles and illustrations.

Its publication was sanctioned by the authorities, but hailed by citizens of the Enlightenment.

-The authors were seen as the heroes of freedom, of anti-absolutism, of liberty, herald of liberty.

-A lot of great men and great women have this notion that what they are doing is not only for them, but for humanity.

This is true for Diderot.

-The ability to have printing was incredibly important in terms of the spread of science because it allowed people to put something down and hand it off and hand it off and hand it off.

-With a society that has freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, you free people to make mistakes.

The raw material for learning is error.

That's what free speech is, right?

It's allowing people to say things that are misguided and mistaken, because you never know.

There may be an element of truth in it.

It may be an important idea, or it might be a bad idea that leads someone else to have a better idea.

But those mistakes, those blasphemes, that's the raw material of knowledge.

It's not the output, but it's the input.

A world without free speech, people aren't free to make those mistakes.

In fact, what happens is the mistakes become enforced by social convention or by law, and that means we live in a world of ignorance and oppression.

-In the modern world, governments regularly make policy choices based on scientific research.

That's generally accepted as a reasonable approach to matters of health, the environment, energy, and agriculture.

But we sometimes have differing opinions on which science is the right science, which science is politically correct.

-Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who became more and more influential in the 1930s in Soviet Russia.

He basically said, "I can solve famine by training wheat crops."

He thought that if you tried hard enough, you could turn one kind of plant into another kind of plant.

There were some brilliant Russian geneticists working at the time, including Vavilov, who disagreed and said, "No," you know, "This is pseudoscience, what you're saying."

-Despite pushback from the scientific community, Lysenko was guided not by evidence, but by ideology.

-"I don't need to understand genetics.

In fact, genetics is a bourgeois mistake."

-Stalin agreed.

He saw attractive parallels with the social philosophy of Karl Marx, that man was largely a product of his own will.

-Lysenko's views were insisted upon.

Wheat was planted in inappropriate conditions and areas.

Famines got worse.

As a result, millions died.

And even after Stalin's death, Khrushchev championed Lysenko's ideas and allowed him to demand the persecution of those who disagreed with him scientifically.

-Many Russian scientific geniuses were silenced, their work discarded.

Some, including Nikolai Vavilov, died in prison.

-It's a famous example of what happens when you allow politicians to decide what's true and what isn't.

The problem with politicizing knowledge is you wind up creating dogmas which people are not allowed to challenge, and, of course, that means you can't find errors, and it also means that you put the state in charge.

-Not only did Lysenkoism leave Russian biology and agronomy in ruins, but these ideas were later adopted by the People's Republic of China and led to the Great Chinese Famine, a four-year disaster that claimed the lives of tens of millions.

The Lysenko episode illustrates how, in the absence of free scientific discourse, junk science can become accepted and guide government policy.

Of course, people continue to have powerful convictions and disagreements about matters of faith and science.

Many of them have played out in public.

-When religion and science disagree, as, for example, in the 19th century, when Charles Darwin proposed the theory of natural selection, then I think the argument has to be had.

Who's right and who's wrong?

And I'm all for having that argument in the open.

-That argument has been in the open.

Each year, people come to the county courthouse in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, to watch actors re-create a legendary trial about Darwin's theory in the very room where it occurred.

-These gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.

-Now, we have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education in the United States.

You know it, and that is all.

-In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, a young teacher named John Scopes was on trial for violating Tennessee's Butler Act, a law that barred teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools.

-Representative Butler ran into a constituent who said his daughter had gone to college, studied evolution, and come home and announced that she was no longer a Christian, that she believed in evolution instead of the biblical account of creation.

Mr. Butler thought that was not an appropriate result from a publicly-funded institution.

-The Tennessee legislature declared it a misdemeanor for anyone to teach, in defiance of the Bible, that humans descended from a lower order of animal.

The ACLU was a relatively new organization.

They'd been formed by Quakers.

They viewed themselves as totally friendly to religion, but they viewed the Butler Act as a prime violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

They immediately issued a press release offering to defend any schoolteacher willing to challenge the constitutionality of that law in court.

-Dayton in 1925 was in its own depression.

The county was hurting.

The local fathers saw the story in the paper and said, "Well, hey, we could do it here and get some publicity."

-The town's leaders took up the ACLU's offer and recruited Scopes, a high school football coach and substitute biology teacher, to serve as the defendant.

He couldn't recall if he had ever taught evolutionary theory, but he was willing to be charged.

The prosecution and defense teams both hired celebrity lawyers -- Clarence Darrow for the defense, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.

-William Jennings Bryan.

At that time, they considered him a great orator.

He ran for the presidency of the United States.

He was a fundamentalist.

Some called him a Bible thumper.

-Clarence Darrow was the most famous trial lawyer of his time, and he crusaded against religiously motivated laws and restrictions.

-When Bryan and Darrow got involved, all of a sudden, this little case took on national and even international prominence.

-There were some 200 reporters that came to town to cover this.

And, of course, you had the lead star.

You had H.L.

Mencken.

-H.L.

Mencken's articles in The Baltimore Sun lampooned the town and its people.

He called Dayton "Monkey Town," and the case "The Monkey Trial."

On one day, there was even an actual chimpanzee in the courtroom.

-It was made into a media event.

And what does the media want?

Well, they want conflict.

And so it becomes understood as science versus religion.

Well, that sells newspapers.

-Clarence Darrow argued that the Bible's account of creation didn't belong in the classroom.

Bryan contended that evolution contradicted the Bible, and teaching it to children would have negative social consequences.

-But all that was barred, because the state said, "No, no.

The only question for the trial court is whether Scopes violated the law."

-On the seventh day, it was so hot in the courthouse that the trial moved outside.

Darrow shocked everyone by calling Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible.

-Darrow asked him questions that he knows there are no good answers to, like, was the world created in six literal days less than 10,000 years ago?

-Do you believe that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

-I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there.

You have a definition of fact that includes imagination.

-Oh, and you have a definition that excludes everything but imagination.

-When Darrow did finally corner Bryan and get Bryan to acknowledge that he did not necessarily mean 7 days of 24 hours, that he meant more like periods of time, that put a chink in the fundamentalist argument, and there was a bit of a gasp in the crowd.

-Those are the people whom you insult.

-Oh, and you insult every man of science and learning in this world because he does not believe in your fool religion.

[ Gavel bangs ] -Bryan and Darrow gave it everything they could give it in this courtroom.

And while they disagreed, and disagreed strongly, they could go have a drink after court and not kill each other.

-At the end of the trial, the jury found Scopes guilty.

-Five days after the trial, after Sunday dinner, Bryan dies in his sleep, creating a martyr to this cause.

The legend of Scopes became a cultural reference point, though at the time, it wasn't viewed as a decisive event.

-Two years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Butler Act, although it overturned Scopes' conviction due to a legal technicality.

The anti-evolution law remained in effect for the next four decades.

-The legend of Scopes continues to reverberate.

It comes up whenever religion and religiously motivated people take their ideas and try to enforce them by law.

-William Jennings Bryan said, in his closing remarks to the court, "Here's been fought out a little case, of little consequence as a case, but the world is interested because it raises a question which one day will be settled right, whether on our side or the other."

♪♪ -Susan Epperson was a 10th-grade biology teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1965.

40 years after the Scopes trial, a law very similar to the Butler Act made it illegal for her to teach evolutionary theory.

-There was a fine associated with this, and possible loss of your job.

And if you tell somebody, "You can't talk about this," I think that's censorship.

So, when the Arkansas Education Association said, "We're thinking of challenging this law," I said, "Okay.

I'll sign on."

I knew that there were people who would be very unhappy about this, but, to me, the pursuit of honesty in science teaching was more important than that.

-Her case went to the United States Supreme Court, which struck down the Arkansas law.

-Epperson v. Arkansas is the end result that the ACLU was hoping for in the Scopes trial.

-The court held that the law violated the First Amendment's establishment clause, which bars the government from favoring a particular religion or religion in general.

Here in the U.S., the First Amendment's two religious freedom guarantees secure not only government's non-establishment of religion, but also individuals' free exercise of religion.

And the First Amendment's free speech guarantee extends to freedom of religious expression, including through clothing and symbols.

But in France, strict secularism limits the public expression of religion in ways that many Americans might find surprising.

♪♪ -[ Speaking French ] -We are in a shop on Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.

It's a street in Paris which specializes in Muslim stores.

This is a jilbab.

That is really very popular with Salafist women, because what they like is having their body completely covered.

♪♪ -[ Speaking French ] -The first reason women give for wearing the niqab is for God.

I remember one of the women in my documentary said... -[ Speaking French ] -..."There is a good freedom of expression and a bad freedom of expression, and mine is considered bad by the French."

It's interesting to see that even though the niqab is forbidden in France in the public space, the store still sells it.

That means there are women who continue to wear it.

-In the U.S., First Amendment protection extends beyond words to symbolic expression, including clothing that expresses a religious belief.

France's restrictions on Muslim female garments stem from a deep commitment to state secularism, what they call "laicité."

-Secularism in France is a principle of emancipation, a principle of freedom to which the French are extremely attached.

-[ Speaking French ] -Every citizen is equal and free, regardless of denomination or lack of religious belief.

-A 1905 law designed to separate the French state from the Catholic Church banned all religious symbols from all aspects of government.

-It's important to remember that it's a separation of the state from churches, plural, not just the Catholic Church, but also the Protestant churches, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, whatever you like.

This neutralization of visible religious signs that is in effect since the law of 1905 should only apply to the state and its representatives.

But it's true that secularism changed a bit in the public debate at the end of the 1980s.

-There were several demonstrations of young girls wearing Islamic head scarves and who wanted to go to school while wearing a head covering.

This was very badly received by the French population, and it became a subject of public debate pretty much continuously for almost 30 years.

[ Women conversing in French ] -In 2004, there was the first ban of head coverings in schools.

In order to make sure it's not only Muslims who are stigmatized, the law states that any religious sign is forbidden at school, but the main target is, of course, girls with head coverings.

-In 2010, France went further and banned all public wearing of Islamic face coverings, the burqa, the niqab.

-They consider the wearing of the niqab or the burqa to be a very expressive and provocative rejection of the basic values of a free and open society, including the values of equality of the sexes.

Some women choose to wear it out of their own volition.

They're not being forced to do so, and it expresses their religious ideals.

I think that they have the right to express those ideals in public, even though the vast majority of people find it disagreeable.

-[ Speaking in French ] -Muslims have lived in France for generations, and there has never been an issue.

I think the real issue is the emergence of Islamism, or political Islam.

These are movements that use religion as an instrument for political purposes.

-[ Speaking French ] -What we must fight is Islamist separatism.

It's a conscious theoretical, sociopolitical project.

It's repeatedly at odds with the values of the republic and often leads to the creation of a counter-society.

-Today, people are made to think that Muslims are everywhere, that they want to take over and that they want their laws to be obeyed by all.

-If you don't like the rules and the habits of this country, I'm sorry, this is a social convention.

This is a social pact.

If you breach the social pact, go elsewhere and live how you want to live.

-Proposed legislation has attempted to ban women who wear head scarves from chaperoning school field trips or even picking up their children from school.

The French Senate did vote to ban head coverings on athletes during competitions.

-[ Speaking French ] -Law always takes precedent in France, and individual freedom is always the rule, and bans are the exception.

-Of course, the law can be changed, a prospect that was vigorously debated in France's 2022 presidential election.

-Emmanuel Macron, the president, clashing with his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, over her plans to ban the Muslim head scarf.

-[ Speaking French ] -We have to liberate women.

We have to fight back against Islamists.

-[ Speaking French ] -The principle of equality means that if you follow this logic, Madame Le Pen, you will ban all religious symbols from public spaces, and not only the hijab.

-Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are fundamental values in a liberal democracy, and they cannot be up for negotiation.

♪♪ The more diverse a society is in terms of religion, culture, and ethnicity, the more diversity of speech there will be.

And therefore, in fact, the more diverse a society is, the more freedom of expression you need.

-Free speech presupposes tolerance because tolerance ultimately means suffering ideas that you yourself absolutely loathe.

That is a difficult concept for human beings, and for most of human history, intolerance has had the upper hand.

-Free expression is a double-edged sword.

One person's freedom to express faith must co-exist with another's freedom to criticize it.

Blasphemy is expression that contradicts or even insults religion.

Perhaps certain figures or topics are too sacred?

♪♪ -This is a newspaper page that was published in 2005, and it changed my life.

I've had to live with security for the past 15, 16 years.

The newspaper where I used to work turned into a fortress.

The prime minister at the time said it was the worst foreign-policy crisis since World War II.

This newspaper page is part of our history now.

-The now infamous Jyllands-Posten page was originally intended as an experiment.

-A Danish children's writer had written a children's book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

When you write a children's book, you need illustrations of the main character.

He did find an illustrator, but that illustrator insisted on anonymity because he was afraid.

This was a big story in Denmark.

Some people were saying that this is not just a single, isolated case, but it's part of a trend.

One reporter came up with this idea, you know, "Why don't we invite illustrators to draw the Prophet so we can find out if there is a censorship or not."

-The newspaper invited professional Danish cartoonists to illustrate the Prophet Muhammad as they saw him, an act of blasphemy to many Muslims, who believe that the depiction of living creatures should be discouraged or even prohibited to prevent idolatry.

-I received 12 very different cartoons.

Only four, as far as I can tell, depicted the Prophet.

There was one cartoon, in fact, making fun of me and the paper, calling us a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.

When these cartoons were published September 30, 2005, I had no idea what was going to happen three months later.

-We're turning now to our top story, the outrage in the Muslim world over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

-The publication of the cartoons provoked outrage, attacks on Danish embassies... [ Gunshots ] ...riots which killed dozens, and a boycott of Danish products.

-If I see him, who did the cartoon about Muhammad, if I see him, I'll kill him.

-The newspaper was just flooded with e-mails from Muslim-majority countries, and there were many death threats.

There was fear inside the paper.

I mean, do you want to go to work and work in a building where you don't know whether there will be a terrorist attack?

-We have this growing incentive to self-censor because of plain fear, and that's what attackers want.

-Today, it would be difficult to find an editor of a newspaper here in Denmark who would publish the cartoons, just out of fear.

So that's one victory for the sort of jihadist veto.

-Many American newspapers and other publications also fell victim to this jihadist veto.

Ironically, in 2009, Yale University Press published a scholarly book about the Danish cartoon incident, but refused to include the cartoons in the book.

Despite the fear of retaliatory violence, some publications, mostly in continental Europe, did reprint the cartoons.

One in France would soon become famous worldwide for all the wrong reasons.

-Charlie Hebdo has reprinted the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked this controversy.

Several of the magazine's managers have been given police protection.

-Charlie Hebdo has had a long history of mocking everyone, whether Jews or Catholics.

If you look at it numerically, it's probably been the Catholic Church who has taken the most flak.

-The tradition of religious satire in France is a product of a very vicious battle between the Catholic Church and society and the public.

-You can think that they're over the top.

That's fine.

But I think it's important that you have a right to mock religion.

-In 2011, the magazine published its "Charia Hebdo" edition, which listed Muhammad as the editor in chief, and its offices were firebombed.

Then in 2015... [ Gunshots ] -This morning, an urgent manhunt for the two gunmen responsible for the terror attack that stunned Paris.

-By the time they'd stopped, at least 12 people were dead.

[ Chanting in French ] ♪♪ -This story really hits home for anyone who, day in and day out, mocks political, social, and religious figures.

-Our hearts are with the staff of Charlie Hebdo and their families tonight.

I know very few people go into comedy, uh, you know, as an act of courage.

-You say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but, unfortunately, every now and then, the sword is mightier than the pen.

-On the streets of this quiet town in the suburbs of Paris, the aftermath of a horrific act of terror.

-A schoolteacher beheaded in response to what he taught in class.

-Samuel Paty was a 47-year-old teacher of history and geography.

-Police believe Samuel Paty was targeted because he showed pupils controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson on free speech.

-In October 2020, this school and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would become forever linked.

-Allez.

[ Speaking French ] -When you are in the classroom, tolerance and openness are important.

We listen to each other and respect each other.

We try and be objective and as neutral as possible.

I have no doubt that my colleague, Samuel Paty, also taught with these same values.

-[ Speaking French ] -One of our countrymen was assassinated... -[ Speaking French ] -...because he was teaching his students about the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.

-[ Speaking French ] -In my classroom, there were questions from my students who wanted to understand, how did we get to this?

When you see that he fell because of a barbaric attack, because of ignorance, my reaction was that of devastation, but also that we don't do this job for nothing.

We will continue to bring knowledge, understanding.

We'll continue even more to make our students question and think, because that's what's important.

♪♪ -Freedom of speech is hard to uphold, because what we're talking about is the freedom to speak dangerous ideas, unpopular ideas, controversial ideas.

-People defend the principle.

They believe in free speech in general.

But when it comes to a specific type of speech, say something is criticizing your religion, you see that and say, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

No, don't go there."

-[ Speaking French ] -This is why France is so attached to these freedoms now.

People fought so hard for these freedoms during the 19th century, for the freedom of expression, the right to blasphemy, the right to caricature.

They fought so hard for these that we can't just go back on them and cross them out.

On the contrary, I'm going to focus on those issues more.

I bring them up more, explain them more.

-Here, it is important to make a distinction between tolerance and respect.

Respect is something that you earn, while tolerance is our ability to live with things that we hate without resorting to bans, intimidation, threats of violence.

I show respect when I go to a mosque.

I take off my shoes.

If I bring my daughter, she will be dressed in a way that does not violate Muslim traditions.

But the Muslims who were in favor of imposing their values on society at large, they were not asking for my respect.

They were asking for my submission.

-Most of us acknowledge the importance of expressing ourselves and listening to the opinions of others in principle.

In reality, though, what happens when we encounter expression we strongly disagree with?

Do we find ourselves wanting to censor it?

For example, what about religious expression through clothing which is at odds with the majority, or insulting a sacred figure and ignoring the norms of religious minorities?

Should either or both be allowed?

We've seen how dogmatic thought and religion in science can stifle scientific inquiry, limit exploration of the world around us, and threaten human progress.

But are there some ideas that don't deserve consideration?

Maybe, but then again, each situation requires examination and discussion of the specific facts and evidence, and that can only happen when we are free to speak.

I'm Nadine Strossen.

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