Freedom of speech, French-style
[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]
Jonathan Turley takes Macron to task for pretending to champion free speech while attacking it:
French President Emmanuel Macron went full Orwell this week. While long the darling of Western media, Macron has been one of the most anti-free-speech leaders in the world. This week, he declared that “The so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.” …
In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss how France has careened down the slippery slope of censorship for decades, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.
Macron has supported figures like his anti-free-speech ally Thierry Breton in globalizing the reach of the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) to curtail speech, including Americans and American companies.
In his latest pitch for censorship, Macron pulls out an old saw that if everyone can speak freely, no one can speak freely.
Macron declared that “There is no freedom if there is no limit to my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework. I know this when I walk down the street: my freedom cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or trashing the public space we all share.”
That line is remarkably telling. It captures how even “insulting” language is treated as a crime in France.
Of course there is an inherent problem with free speech – which is that liars have free reign and can spread their lies with impunity. But who decides who the liars are? That is the question, and that is what makes free speech necessary. We saw during the COVID era that the government was busily engaged in censoring what turned out to be the truth. We need no further demonstration of the dangers of censorship.
But France, unlike the US but like most of Europe, has no robust tradition of freedom of speech. I discovered that – much to my surprise – quite early in my blogging career, when I traveled to France twenty years ago to write about the al-Durah trials. You can read what I wrote back then in several posts, especially this one. Here’s an excerpt:
What I hadn’t realized was how US-centric my questions had been. Yes, of course, I knew that France has a different legal system than ours: theirs was based mainly on the Napoleonic Code, whereas ours was a predominantly common law system of evolving and changing interpretations of previous case law and statutes, under the overarching protection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
But surely, as two Western countries purporting to share a love of liberty, the law of France and that of the US shouldn’t be all that different.
It was only when I looked into the law of defamation under the French legal system that I realized the differences were not subtle, as I’d previously thought. They were major, reflecting profound differences in the attitudes of each country towards justice, its citizenry, society–and, in particular, the value and desirability of freedom of speech.
Here is a summary of French law concerning defamation; see pages thirteen and fourteen for the relevant material.
Essentially, France has made it incredibly easy to win a libel suit. Nearly all you need to do is to show that you were defamed (“any allegation or imputation of an act affecting the honor or reputation of the person or body against whom it is made”). I said “nearly all” because yes, there is a defense, and that is truth.
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? But it is bad, and this is why: the burden of proof in France falls on the defendant.
That’s such a dry, legal phrase: “burden of proof.” But what it means in practice is that it’s up to the person who made the defamatory statement to prove to a three-judge panel (not a jury; this reflects the fact that the French have far less trust in the decisions of its ordinary citizen than the US does) that the defamatory statement was true. Or, if the statement concerned a matter of public importance, he/she is required to prove that he/she conducted a serious investigation before making the statement, and that the statement was measured and objective and without even a trace of personal hostility.
Check out that word, prove. It means just what it says, not “indicate he/she had reason to believe it was true” or “suggest it might be true,” or even “prove it was most likely true.” It places the burden of proof in defending against a libel suit unconscionably — almost ludicrously — high.
In this time in which social media has taken over so much of our communication, and algorithms manipulate people for nefarious reasons, the spread of lies is facilitated and helped along by the general historical ignorance of much of the Western world (especially young people). But censorship adds another layer of control and ultimately gives more opportunity to spread lies of the official variety.
What is the solution? I confess that I don’t know. But Macron’s solution, or Andy Burnham’s, is no solution at all.
I know this when I walk down the street: my freedom cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or trashing the public space we all share.”
Yeah, I saw this statement not long after Macron spoke it. Wow. OK, I get it (he said sarcastically). Whether it is a physical assault or a verbal assault, let’s treat them all the same. The teensy weensy little problem is that the first one is unambiguous and frequently causes severe consequences, whereas the second is can be quite ambiguous and rarely causes major consequences. And what the hell is “trashing the public space”? How much room for interpretation is contained in that?
It reminds me of some pundit’s analysis of Bill Clinton’s rhetoric style. He would begin with some simple and obvious truth, then move to a second statement that was related to the first and sounded somewhat similar. Except, it wasn’t that similar. Then Clinton would say or imply that we know all of these things are true, which they weren’t. Macron’s mistake was to utter both things in the same sentence. Clinton’s worked better because he camouflaged it with three or more sentences.
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…a three-judge panel (not a jury; this reflects the fact that the French have far less trust in the decisions of its ordinary citizen than the US does)
I took a stab at de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America long ago, and didn’t get very far. If I understand his motive for the book correctly, he was interested in the contrast between a country like France which was led by aristocrats such as himself, and America where ideas about equality and democratic selection permeated throughout our society.
He was in fact one of the key directors in how France’s prison system was organized and functioned. Could ordinary commoners be trusted in such an important government function, he mused?
I believe he had a fairly open mind about this question, and was impressed by many of the contrasts he saw in America, but I’m not sure he gave up on his faith in the aristocracy.
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I like true crime documentary shows, and one I watched was European. At first I thought it was all in France, but later realized it was all French speaking, covering Belgium and Switzerland too.
Their violent crime and homicide investigations in Franc are rather messed up IMO. As soon as an actual homicide detective is assigned to a case, a judge (desk jockey) is also assigned, and the judge micro-manages everything thing the actual investigator does. The judge does stay on his or her toes and is in very frequent contact, but all the obvious problems with this arrangement do seem to occur.
Extending Professor Turley’s excerpt, he concluded with this:
And so the French have neither liberty, equity, nor fraternity, and no security or safety either.
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“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is a quote and motto attributed to Benjamin Franklin (and he actually did print or say it at least three times).
https://quotesfromthepast.com/benjamin-franklin-on-sacrificing-freedom-for-security/
Not to worry, once the muzzies take over, we won’t be hearing about “free speech” any longer. The sound of the muezzin proclaiming the adhan over huge loudspeakers in every French city, town, village and hamlet five times daily will be the only sound heard in all the land where people once cried, “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.”
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Once there are any restrictions of free speech, it opens the door for the politically powerful to determine what constitutes acceptable speech.
It is no coincidence that the most repressive regimes in history – Stalin, Mao, Hitler, et.al., forbade free speech.
The danger of free speech – especially in a constitutional republic – is the willful ignorance of the voting populace (or at least, enough of them). Their ignorance allows them to be easily manipulated via propaganda and to vote into office those seeking to destroy our form of government.
Of course, it does not help that the demoncrat party supports voting rights for non-US citizens as well as wide open borders. If this does not convince you that democracts hate our constitutional republic , I don’t know what does.
Unfortunately, when it comes to politics in general and getting out their message, the Republicans are inept, incompetent.
What one can say of the French (and the Austrians) is that there is among the public more resistance there to the elite’s population replacement project than there is anywhere else in Europe outside the former East Bloc.
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Macron’s (and others’) version of “free speech”?
(If trends continue—and if the Democrats return to power) coming soon to a neighborhood near you…
Europe doesn’t logic well.