The French-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi has decided to reject the Legion of Honor, the highest official decoration in France, due to the “hypocritical” attitude of her host country which, in her opinion, does not treat Iranian dissidence with the consideration it should. and is condescending to the regime.
In a letter to the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, published on her Instagram account, and then in a video, the cartoonist, filmmaker and painter, awarded last year with the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, says that It is difficult for him to “understand France’s policy with Iran.”
In a very particular way, he complains that while “freedom-loving young Iranians, dissidents and artists are denied visas,” even for tourist reasons; The children of “Iranian oligarchs” can walk “through Paris and Saint Tropez (on the Côte d’Azur) without any problem.”
In her opinion, support for “the women’s revolution cannot be limited to photos with the victims or with celebrities in commemorations of the death of Masha Amini”, the young woman arrested in 2022 for not wearing the Islamic veil according to the regulatory code of the Iranian regime, and who died in the hands of the Police.
“I cannot ignore what seems to me to be France’s hypocritical attitude towards Iran,” emphasizes the artist, who insists that “Iranians do not need communication, we need concrete actions.” He also points out that his refusal to receive the Legion of Honor “is in no way an action or thought against France. On the contrary, I deeply love this country, which is mine.” And she adds that she will feel honored “when all the defenders of freedom will be at my side.”
‘Persepolis’, activism and complaints against repression
Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in the Iranian city of Racht to a family of communist sympathizers and spent her childhood in that country, before being sent to a high school in Austria at the age of 14. Later he returned to Iran to study Fine Arts in Tehran, where he graduated in the late 1980s, and went to France in 1994, first to Strasbourg and then to Paris, where he fully entered the world of comics.
From 2000 to 2003 he published the four volumes of what has been his great success, Persepolis, drawn in black and white, in which he tells of his own childhood in the Tehran of the Islamic revolution and then his breakup with his departure to Europe. The author was nationalized as French in 2006 and the following year she adapted her award-winning comic to film, a film that received the Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival, despite the pressure exerted on France by the Iranian regime to try to prevent it.
In the last fifteen years, she has continued her career as a filmmaker and has also established herself as a painter, while she has been particularly active in denouncing the situation in Iran and in defending women’s rights, with calls so that Europeans and Westerners are tougher in sanctions against repression.
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