[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.
