• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Hidden Harmonies China Blog

Hidden Harmonies China Blog

As China Re-Awakens, Finding New Harmonies in a Brave New World...

  • About Us
  • China Charities
  • FAQ
    • Terms of Service
  • Recommended Readings

Freedom of Speech: Case Study on That Medieval, Backward, Senseless French Law Against Insulting the French President

July 30, 2013 by Mr. Allen 5 Comments

Freedom of SpeechChina is often regarded as a nation without Freedom of Speech – or at least a nation that disrespects Freedom of Speech, or a nation with serious infractions of Freedom of Speech.  I have often argued that such disparaging conclusions rarely turn out to based on Freedom itself, but a disrespect of China’s social, historical, and political contexts and current interests. I will use recent events to further demonstrate my thinking.

For those of you paying attention on issues surrounding “Freedom of Speech” on the international stage, you might have noticed that France caused quite a stir last week by finally abolishing a law against insulting its president.

The law in question was thrown into the international spotlight when President Sarkozy charged fellow Frenchman Hervé Eon for holding up a cardboard sign at a 2008 rally telling Sarkozy “Casse-toi pov’con,” a profanity in French that directly translates mildly to “break yourself off, poor jerk.” Here is an excerpt of the article “Yes, it really was a crime in France to insult the president until this week. Here’s why” from the Washington Post:

[A]fter 132 years, 20 presidents, one Vichy Marshal and five provisional heads of state later, a left-activist named Hervé Eon will be the last Frenchman to ever violate the law, which the French Parliament finally overturned on Thursday after a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.

…

Between 1881 and 1958, the law against presidential insults was used only nine times. Then, in May 1958, France devolved into a political crisis so severe that, to hear it described now, it sounds more like something out of the Middle East or the most troubled regions of sub-Saharan Africa than Western Europe. The crisis and the decade following it led to heightened curbs on free speech, including aggressive criminal prosecutions for insulting the president.

By 1958, France had been at war for four years in Algeria – technically a civil war, as Paris considered this North African country a part of France – and it was going badly. Some politicians were wondering if the military shouldn’t pull out altogether, as they had in Vietnam a few years earlier. The military leadership, dominated by right-wing nationalists who saw the Algerian war as a point of national honor after the defeats of World War II, insisted that France stay at any cost. When it looked as if they might be overruled, a group of French generals in Algeria overthrew the civilian government there, landed troops on Corsica and announced that they would soon invade mainland France and march to Paris to seize power. Mere hours before the planned assault, France’s civilian president announced he would meet the military’s demands by ceding power to the former military leader and national hero Charles de Gaulle, who promptly dissolved the constitution.

De Gaulle’s 10-year reign saw more attempted military coups, mass unrest, assassination attempts by officers with his own military and a difficult effort to end the war, which he did in 1962 when Algeria finally won independence. Perhaps in response to the threats he faced or perhaps out of the paranoia that such instability can sometimes breed, de Gaulle did lean in the direction of authoritarianism. And this included frequently convicting people under the previously obscure law against presidential insults.

…

One of the law’s fiercest critics during the de Gaulle years was a young socialist activist named Francois Mitterend, who would go on to be the French president from 1981 to 1995. In the 1968 Time article, Mitterend is quoted as calling the rule “a law of oppression” and pledging to work toward its appeal. He never succeeded and, though as president he pledged never to use the law, he didn’t bother attempting to repeal it. Perhaps, like much of the turmoil in France during the 1960s, he’d hoped not to rehash it all.

Most people in the U.S. applaud the appeal of the law as anachronistic.  But it is important to see that the law is not as frivolous as it might appear to be.

America, too, had laws against insulting its government in its history (although most of those laws have been long since repealed as not really designed to uphold the nation’s security).

In 1798, for example, the U.S. Congress – which contains many prominent members of the original signatories of the America’s famed First Amendment – passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. That law prohibited the publication of

false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame…or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them…hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States.

Some 150 years since the founding of the U.S., the U.S. Congress passed the so-called Espionage Act of 1917. President Wilson had publicly stated that “[a]uthority to exercise censorship over the press … is absolutely necessary to the public safety.” While the Senate would remove the censorship provision by a one-vote margin, the Act still made it a crime to convey information that interferes with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies. It made it illegal to cause (or attempt to cause) insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the armed forces of the United States or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. The Espionage Act of 1918 would more broadly forbid the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. It actually made it criminal to make any speech that caused others to view the American government or its institutions with contempt during times of war.

Few of the founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution would have viewed any of these laws as unconstitutional.  What makes them unconstitutional has more to do with the historical circumstances the U.S. later found itself – the nature of the harms the nation actually faced and the partisan application of the laws to frivolously restrict speech – rather than the principles underlying the laws per se.

Given these histories, it should not be too surprising that the French law has survived until so recently.  While there has been ever greater convergence between European and American standards of Freedom of Speech in law and values, the French experience is still distinctly different.  As the Washington Post article noted, as late as the late 50’s and early 60’s, France did enter a period of political instability and uncertainty when the law was legitimately leveraged to keep stability.  Even today, defaming and insulting “public officials” – not surprisingly – remains a separate discrete offence in France under its Press Law carrying exactly the same penalty as the just abolished law against defaming and insulting the presidency.

In general. the problem with any talks about Freedom of Speech is that the Freedom is never – can never be – an absolute value.  Inherent in any Freedom is always the limit against harm.  Freedom of Speech never includes a general license to do harm.  Herein lies the existential, but little debated, definition of Freedom.  Harm is not a limit or an exception to freedom.  It lies at the very root and definition of Freedom.  If speech per se were just about “speech” (“banter” if you will) that can be separated from harm (acts if you will), everyone could surely have as much of it as he or she desires. But it is not. Speech always has the potential to generate actual, real harm. “Freedom of speech” is thus about the art of devising rhetoric to cast something as mere “speech” vs. “acts” that cause “harm” or the related art of defining and weighing the costs and benefits of “speech” should that something be categorized as “speech.”

If every generation thinks it has gotten the balance of freedom better than the previous, it’s not because the previous was not enlightened, it’s because circumstances have changed, and rules and norms need to be updated. To the extent there appears to be a march toward ever expanding freedom in the West, it comes about only because the West has been on a progressive march to become ever more dominant (and thus more secure) in the world.  Consider for example how the harm facing a country like France after WWII as part of a political and military alliance (NATO) that outspends its potential foe annually by a ratio of over 10:1 must be strikingly different from that before WWII.

If one understands the above, one can understand why the abolition of the French law against insulting and defaming its president is not about freedom per se. It reflects merely that the harms facing the French state, the French nation, French society, or the French polity have changed.  If indeed the insult and defamation of the French President is ever deemed to cause actual harm to the French polity or nation, make no doubt, those acts will become criminalized again.

On the topic of freedom of speech in France, one should not forget that in France, wearing head scarfs in public is still against the law.  It is illegal because public display of head scarfs is deemed a threat to the French’s unique and particular sacred sense of  “principle of secularism.” In France and Germany, denying the holocaust is also still a crime.  The holocaust is still deemed sensitive enough that allowing it to be denied  is deemed to cause unacceptable social and political turmoil.  And in Germany, joining a neo-Nazi party and making pro-Nazi speech – together a host of other activities that the current government there deems to be against “personal dignity” or the German “Constitution” – are also illegal. Apparently, Nazi ideas has enough pull with a significant number of its populace that the government deems it to be a real, existential danger to today’s entire political order.

All this appear so quaint to those who thought freedom was about an absolute ideal. Yet, the inconsistency between the French or Germany conceptions of Freedom vs. say the Americans is not that they have different visions of freedom (which, really, I think is just empty rhetoric), but that they have different perceptions of harm (this is the real stuff).  The recent Snowden affair where the American public have wholesale bought the government’s labeling of a whistle blower as a traitor is yet another opportunity to see how Freedom is defined by underlying harm, not by any absolute ideal of Freedom.

Discussions of Freedom necessarily requires one to live and embrace each society’s cultural, political, and historical experiences.  That’s why debates on Freedom of Speech can be so controversial, emotional, and demeaning. If one is not careful, discussions about Freedom can easily devolve into categorical de-valuation and discounting of other peoples’ historical, political, cultural experiences.

The Washington Post welcomes the abolition of the French law against insulting its president politely, even respectfully.  Can you imagine it doing similarly for discussions over freedom of speech for China this way?

Filed Under: Analysis, politics Tagged With: China, France, freedom of speech, sarkozy

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Black Pheonix says

    July 31, 2013 at 7:20 am

    The hypocrisy of “freedom of speech” proponents in the West simply willfully ignore the fact that there are SEVERE and HARSH punishments for some speeches (some very benign ones) in the West.

    During the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, US and EU authorities resorted to many harsh tactics to disperse legal gatherings.

    In NYC, if you stepped off the sidewalk in some places, you can be arrested (rather forcefully), and thrown in jail for a night.

    Then they used sanitation as reason to destroy all the protesters’ tents.

    On the other hand, even bombs and fires in China are somehow portrayed as forms of “protest”.

  2. ersim says

    July 31, 2013 at 9:01 am

    Telling a bold face LIE is considered “freedom of speech/expression”. The Western “media” calls it an “expert opinion”. Talking about “journalist standards”.

  3. YinYang says

    July 31, 2013 at 9:52 pm

    Allen – great definition:

    “Freedom is defined by underlying harm.”

  4. Allen says

    September 12, 2014 at 2:07 pm

    From http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/world/europe/germany-bans-support-of-isis.html

    BERLIN — Germany on Friday announced a ban on activities that support the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including any displays of its black flag, as part of an effort to suppress the extremist group’s propaganda and recruitment work among Germans.

    The ban was announced amid a growing Western-led drive to galvanize countries around the world, but particularly in the Middle East, to destroy the group, which has seized parts of northern and eastern Syria and northern Iraq and has become known for its brutality.

    Germany’s crackdown reflected concern among officials about ISIS’s appeal in the country. About 450 Germans are believed to have departed for Syria as ISIS recruits, punctuating fears that they could return to Germany radicalized and dangerous. Under the new restrictions, all displays of support for ISIS, and all efforts aimed at enticing Germans to join the group, are prohibited.

    “Germany is a true democracy, and there is no place here for a terror organization directed at the constitutional system and the belief in understanding among different peoples,” Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister, said in a statement announcing the ban.

    By making it illegal to support the group, instead of seeking to ban ISIS in Germany outright, the police will be able to react immediately, without needing to involve the often cumbersome judicial system.

    “A ban of the organization may not have had the desired impact,” Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, told ARD public television. “This is aimed at smashing an organizational structure, to rob members of grass-roots support for their activities.”

    Here we have a case study of an advanced, democratic society willingly outlaw political activities, including those at the institutional, organizational and grass-roots level, because it does not like the politics.

    The effort is aimed at curbing the “propaganda” of ISIS (as if there is no “propaganda” in the West that floods and pollutes the world over).

    And you’ve got to like this quote:

    “Germany is a true democracy, and there is no place here for a terror organization directed at the constitutional system and the belief in understanding among different peoples,” Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister, said in a statement announcing the ban.

    The Chinese feel the same about Dalai Lama and the exiled Tibetans and Rebiya Kadeer and separatist organizations like ETIM. Yet any restrictions on them is deemed by the West to be a worst violation of human rights imaginable.

    I wonder why the double standard and hypocrisy, is it really because China is not (but the West is) a “true democracy” – as if that statement is itself not hypocritical (see, e.g., recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page )!

  5. Allen says

    September 23, 2014 at 1:00 pm

    Censorship is not just about government censorship. Much, much more often, it’s about censorship different parties within the ecosystem of power.

    For example, recently, major publishers decided to turn down books that arguably cast Nazis in a sympathetic light.

    See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/books/martin-amiss-zone-of-interest-makes-european-publishers-squirm.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=3

    PARIS — In France, they say they’re puzzled by the humor. In Germany, they say it will be difficult to market. Martin Amis’s latest novel, “The Zone of Interest,” a satire set in a concentration camp during the Second World War, is having trouble gaining traction in Europe, where his longtime French and German publishers have rejected it.

    The novel was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain in August to strong reviews and will be released in the United States by Knopf on Sept. 30. By turns a love story and a meditation on Nazi horrors written with self-consciously grotesque humor, “The Zone of Interest” takes place in the fictional Kat Zet I, the same fictional branch of Auschwitz where Mr. Amis set his 1991 novel, “Time’s Arrow.” The new book is certainly not the first work of fiction to treat the Holocaust with dark humor. But in Europe, where there has been particular sensitivity recently to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, publishers this time seem squeamish.

    In a telephone interview, Mr. Amis, whose books routinely come out in France and Germany, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the publishers’ reactions. “But you never quite know what motivates them.”

    In France, the storied house Gallimard declined to publish the novel because “it wasn’t very convincing,” said Marie-Pierre Gracedieu, Mr. Amis’s editor there. “It was for literary reasons.”

    …

    Piero Salabè, Mr. Amis’s editor at Carl Hanser Verlag, said the publisher had turned down the book for marketing as well as literary reasons. “Our decision was based on the book’s contents as well as on economic considerations,” Mr. Salabè said. He added that the decision had “nothing to do with the Holocaust being a sensitive issue in Germany.”

    Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
    Mr. Amis “is a major literary figure, but unfortunately not in Germany, so we could not hope to make a best seller with his new book,” Mr. Salabè wrote in an earlier email. He noted that Mr. Amis’s 2010 novel, “The Pregnant Widow,” was “widely (though critically) reviewed, but sold modestly,” and that the house had also rejected Mr. Amis’s 2008 collection, “The Second Plane.”

    Mr. Salabè said “The Zone of Interest” was not “frivolous,” as an interviewer in the newspaper The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had described it in a recent interview with Mr. Amis. Nor, he said, did the book chart dangerous new ground in Germany.

    Still, Carl Hanser Verlag’s rejection of the book has caused something of a stir in Germany. The newspaper Die Welt said it was “ridiculous” that the publisher found the book’s literary merits lacking. “If there is a scandal about ‘The Zone of Interest,’ it’s the fact that a German publisher thinks it has to withhold the work of one of the most important British contemporary authors from German readers,” the paper wrote.

    In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the London correspondent, Gina Thomas, attributed the controversy to cultural differences. “The problem with the novel lies in his uninhibited English perception of humor, at least for some German readers,” she wrote.

    Right … go wiggle and squirm … and squirm and censor they will … if not by the pawns of the elite, then by the bruteness of law in the name of “values,” “democracy,” “freedom,” or (when all fails) “national security.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload the CAPTCHA.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • The TikTok Ban That Failed. This Ban Is Not Really About ‘National Security’ Rather It Is About Greed And Control.
  • 大山的女兒–Daughter of the Mountain
  • No, the Chinese does not express glee over Shinzo Abe’s assassination and how western propaganda got it wrong about what Chinese thinks of Abe
  • The Overt Politicization of the Origins of Covid-19
  • The U.S. Loves Wars…

Recent Comments

  • Hengxin on 大山的女兒–Daughter of the Mountain
  • Hompuso on Short Note on Media Disinformation: No, No, No… CIA is not Impersonating Others in Hacking Others … There is just not Proof!
  • Abraham on The Overt Politicization of the Origins of Covid-19
  • purislot on (Letter) Web search for Tiananmen not censored, but do people care?
  • hanhan on 且谈1989年的天安门事件

Tag Cloud

america Beijing censorship China china-u.s. relations coronavirus corruption culture dalai lama defamation againt Chinese democracy earthquake economy education Environment featured freedom freedom of speech Google government history hong kong human rights humor india internet japan media media bias nationalism olympics politics propaganda racism reform riot rule of law sino-u.s. relations sixfour South China Seas taiwan tiananmen tibet U.S. China Relations xinjiang

Archives

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Blogroll

  • China Dialogue
  • China in Africa: The Real Story by Deborah Brautigam
  • Chinese Portal
  • ESWN (東南西北)
  • Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
  • Fool's Mountain (sibling blog)
  • iLook China
  • Moon of Shanghai
  • Outcast Journalism
  • Professor Ann Lee
  • Sino Platonic
  • The Anti-Empire Report

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in