Against a background of general indifference and with the support of the majority of the political parties, a law has just been passed by French MPs that considerably restricts freedom of expression. A form of speech police has been introduced to control comments that may be made even in informal private circles.
The aim of the bill, proposed at the initiative of MPs from Emmanuel Macron’s party Renaissance, was to “strengthen the criminal response to racist or antisemitic offences,” and subject those expressions to “a guaranteed and systematic criminal penalty.”
The rise in antisemitic acts since the attacks of October 7th provided MPs with the perfect pretext for their intervention: in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the aim was to redouble vigilance against the antisemitism at work in France, like in other European societies. But under the guise of combating antisemitism, any speech deemed discriminatory by the dominant system is likely to fall within the scope of the law.
The debates in the National Assembly revealed a dangerous extension of the crime of expressing opinion to the private sphere, something that was accepted by the deputies without restrictions. If we consider the abolition of the boundary between public and private as one of the most obvious characteristics of totalitarian regimes, it is clear that this law takes the French Republic a little further into the realm of “totalitarianism without the gulag”—to use the words of Quebec essayist Matthieu Bock-Côté in his latest book by the same name.
The trend is not new: recent legislative developments have already made it possible to condemn not only acts but also words and even intentions. Essayist Anne-Sophie Chazaud, the author of a book on freedom of expression, also points out that, as far back as August 2017, a decree issued at the start of Macron’s first term in office provided for the criminalisation of private conversations—in effect encouraging private-sphere spying. Today, we are moving from decree to law, and the insistence on legally pursuing offending remarks of a ‘non-public’ nature opens the way to all kinds of excesses.
In legal terms, there is still a fine line between ‘non-public’ speech and private speech. Non-public speech includes, for example, discussions on a WhatsApp group or Telegram channel, or in group emails. The ‘non-public’ dimension implies a collective nature and the existence of a “community of interests,” but also the absence of any explicitly requested confidentiality. A family dinner, for example, should not be affected. But the law is deliberately unclear, leaving it open to interpretation. Add to the participants in that very same family dinner a group of friends who are more or less close, or members of the same sports club, and you are on the verge of a “community of interests” that will allow the legislator to censor anything.
Unfortunately, it is all too easy to foresee the developments that will result from this law.
From the moment that any type of discriminatory comment can be reported, questions of the rights of sexual minorities—which by their very nature touch on the private and intimate sphere—offer an infinite range of possibilities for criminalisation. We can imagine all sorts of situations becoming potentially dangerous, with the division reaching right to the heart of families: a mother wanting to help her daughter keep her child rather than have an abortion or a father worried about his son’s desire to change gender could soon be liable for prosecution.
Elsewhere in Europe, the same trend can be observed. A former Flemish parliamentarian has just been sentenced to prison for alleged “racist memes” shared on a private discussion chat group. In Britain, a private citizen was sentenced to prison for distributing stickers demanding a stop to mass immigration. As Xavier Van Lierde, a journalist on the conservative Radio Courtoisie radio station, worries: in the near future, what about opinions on health policies, climate, or geopolitical issues?
But perhaps the most worrying aspect of this sequence of events is not the content of the French bill—merely the umpteenth repetition of provisions already more or less contained in previous texts—but the now well-established habit among members of parliament to consider ever tighter restrictions on thought and expression as a good and obvious thing that there is no point in opposing. Discussion seems to have deserted the field in favour of an absolutely suffocating unanimity that no one seems to want to question.