It was bound to happen: the puritan wave of the new McCarthyism—this wokism imported from the United States, draped in progressivism but in truth nothing more than ideological policing—has reached France. And here, in the land of Voltaire, Charlotte Gainsbourg is denied the right to embody Gisèle Halimi, a historic figure of the feminist cause, on the grounds that she does not recite the approved catechism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!

An actress with a singular path, daughter of a Jewish libertarian artist and an English icon, Charlotte Gainsbourg must, to deserve this role, present her ideological certificate, swear an oath on the tablets of dogma, and above all erase everything in her intimate uniqueness that disturbs the new Sanhedrin of social networks.

We once believed that an actor, when embodying a character, transforms, lending their body and voice to a fate not their own. Not anymore: now identity purity is demanded. The bonfires are back. Once, books were thrown into the flames; today, actors are thrown to the digital mob. Once, the Index of forbidden works was brandished; today, “tweets” and “likes” are waved as incriminating evidence. The new prosecutors don’t need proof—they have hashtags.

The neo-McCarthyist attack on Charlotte Gainsbourg is not the first. The United States has already provided the models. Hollywood, laboratory of punitive morality, has already offered its excesses: a heterosexual actor (Tom Hanks, Philadelphia, 1993) forced to apologize for playing a homosexual; a “valid” actor (Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot, 1989) vilified for portraying a disabled man on screen; a “cisgender” actor (Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl, 2015) crucified for embodying a transgender character!

Tomorrow, will Meryl Streep be banned from playing Thatcher on the pretext that she has never governed a country? Should Lawrence of Arabia be burned because Peter O’Toole was not from the desert? And why not demand that an actor playing a murderer actually have blood on his hands? That a performer playing a madman produce a psychiatric certificate?

In this absurd drift, there is no longer any interest in acting, fiction, or art—only a civil register of ideological purity. Charlotte Gainsbourg pays the price of this madness. She pays for being a free actress in an era that can no longer tolerate play, only authentication. They do not want an actress; they demand an activist. They do not want a role; they demand a perfect double, an ideological clone. This is the pure and simple erasure of art, which is no longer imitation, metamorphosis, and fruitful lies, but only a moral mirror.

Let us be clear: Charlotte Gainsbourg is not judged on her talent but on her “ideological pedigree.” That is where neo-McCarthyist terror leads: actors must no longer perform, they must confess. They are not asked to embody lives, but to swear allegiance to a political line. And if, by misfortune, they fail to conform to the liturgy of “just opinions,” the prosecutors of the moment strip them of the right to exist on screen.

Let the inquisitors rest assured: Charlotte Gainsbourg, in playing Gisèle Halimi, will do more honor to her memory than all of them put together. For Halimi was never the priestess of a dogma, but the advocate of freedom. She fought against black-robed judges, and now they would betray her by handing over her image to the black-shirted judges of social networks! A tragic irony.

What is unfolding around this film is grotesque and sinister. Charlotte Gainsbourg is ordered to step aside because she supposedly does not hold the “right” positions on Israel and Palestine. As if Halimi, a free woman, rebellious to her fingertips, would ever have accepted that her memory be turned into a party card! No: she would have laughed at these new priests who want to turn cinema into catechism and actors into seminarians.

The Halimi-Gainsbourg case is emblematic: the very essence of acting is being erased—artifice, transfiguration, the mask. Halimi herself, lawyer of impossible causes, would no doubt have scoffed at this creeping censorship. For art cannot be reduced to biography or to a militant notebook. Charlotte Gainsbourg is not Gisèle Halimi, but that will not prevent her from embodying her personality and keeping her memory alive—precisely through the power and magic of acting.

Those who hound Charlotte Gainsbourg are the hysterical grandchildren of old Senator McCarthy. The same hatred of difference, of pluralism of opinion, of the debate of ideas. The same passion for blacklists. The same obsession with excommunication. Simply, yesterday they brandished lists of names in smoke-filled rooms; today, they unleash digital lynchings from a smartphone. The inquisitors have changed costumes, not methods. Yes, the neo-McCarthyist logic has not changed: it files, it suspects, it summons, and it condemns. The only difference is that yesterday’s prosecutors compiled blacklists, while today’s tweet compulsively.

Whether we like it or not, Charlotte Gainsbourg will embody Gisèle Halimi better than all her accusers combined. Because she is an actress, because she knows how to disappear behind a role, because she has that nervous fragility that makes her incarnations more real than reality itself.

Cinema is precisely the art of illusion. The new puritans want to turn it into an extension of the tribunal. But the inquisitors of yesterday and today must remember that throughout the ages, ideologues may build their pyres, but art always rises again from the ashes!