A municipal cultural center here on France's border with Switzerland organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe's commitment to secularism. The play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance.

The production quickly stirred up passions that echoed the cartoon uproar. "This play . . . constitutes an insult to the entire Muslim community," said a letter to the mayor of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, signed by Said Akhrouf, a French-born cafe owner of Moroccan descent and three other Islamic activists representing Muslim associations. They demanded the performance be cancelled.

Instead, Mayor Hubert Bertrand called in police reinforcements to protect the theater. On the night of the December reading, a small riot broke out involving several dozen people and youths who set fire to a car and garbage cans. It was "the most excitement we've ever had down here," says the socialist mayor.

. . . . Now that tempers have calmed, Mayor Bertrand says he is proud his town took a stand by refusing to cave in under pressure to call off the reading. Free speech is modern Europe's "foundation stone," he says. "For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them."

Something about the attitude of this mayor tugged at my memory, and I wondered if the residents of Saint-Genis-Pouilly descend from the Huguenots who fled into the mountains of the Swiss border (among many other places) in the 16th c. to escape persecution by the Catholic Church. Another town in that area is Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which matter-of-factly sheltered thousands of Jewish children during WWII. In the documentary "Weapons of the Spirit," the people of Chambon repeatedly cited their Huguenot heritage when asked about their motivations. Like other dissident Protestant groups, the Huguenots sought religious freedom by emigrating to the New World in large numbers, had a deep distrust of state religion and state authority in general, and considered the Old Testament equal to the New as a source of Divine instruction.

I wasn't able to find out if that is indeed the heritage of Saint-Genis-Pouilly. But the good humor, the matter-of-fact refusal to be pushed around, and the physical and intellectual distance from the centers of urbane sophistry -- all remind me of the villagers of Chambon.

Then we have the man who guided the campaign against the Voltaire play, one Hafid Ouardiri, who is about as far from a Huguenot as you can get. The Protestant dissidents helped usher in the Enlightenment by precipitating a rupture between the Church and the State, which in turn set the stage for the concept of inalienable individual rights.

Mr. Ouardiri is going in the other direction:

Mr. Ouardiri, an Algerian-born former leftist radical, came to France in the 1960s and says he used to chant the 1968 student slogan, "It is forbidden to forbid." Now a devout Muslim, he says he champions "the need to forbid." Algeria and other Muslim countries, he says, were colonized by Europeans "nourished by Voltaire."

So are we still, I hope.