Europeans regularly insist that their countries protect free speech, but it is always a lie. Free speech does not exist in Europe, including in France, because free speech does not truly exist outside of the United States and its First Amendment protections.
France proved this point again on Monday when 10 people were found guilty of “cyberbullying” France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron. Specifically, those people were found to have posted “particularly degrading, insulting, and malicious” comments that “have had cumulative harmful effects.” One was sentenced to six months in prison.
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The comments in question were insinuations that Brigitte Macron is a man (a popular conspiracy theory among some moronic American podcast hosts) and criticism of the age gap between the Macrons (she was French President Emmanuel Macron’s teacher when he was 15, and she was 39). Several of the defendants said that their posts were merely jokes and they didn’t understand why they were being prosecuted, but in France, hurting the feelings of the wife of the most powerful person in the country is a prosecutable offense.
Emmanuel Macron has claimed that “There is in France a freedom to blaspheme which is attached to the freedom of conscience. I am here to protect all these freedoms. In France, one can criticize a president, governors, blaspheme.” But that is not true. France does not have free speech, as evidenced in these convictions and in the convictions of two men for “contempt” back in 2019 when they burned an effigy of the president. Macron is a staunch supporter of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which orders tech companies to censor hate speech, even if those companies are based in America.
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In fact, France makes “contempt of public officials” illegal. That is described as anything that may “affect the personal dignity or the respect owed to a public official.” You are, by law, prevented from doing or saying anything that would harm the personal dignity of a politician, someone who holds actual government power. That is France’s idea of “free speech.”
Europe does not have free speech because free speech is not realistically protected anywhere in the world other than the U.S. Europeans desperately try to claim they have free speech, as they recognize that America has the moral high ground on this issue, and yet they will turn around and shuttle people off to jail for posting memes that harm the “personal dignity” of a politician. Like much of the rest of Europe, France is a hypocrite on free speech, which is proven one “hate speech” prosecution at a time.