On January 11, 2015, in many cities in France, huge crowds took to the streets to pay tribute to the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdodecimated a few days earlier by two terrorists who wanted to avenge the prophet of their religion. “After this historic march, wrote a famous anti-Semitic agitator on his Facebook page, I’m finally going home. Know that this evening, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.» Coulibaly was the name of another terrorist, who had just shot dead a policewoman in the street on January 8, then four customers of a kosher grocery store on January 9.
Dieudonné was sentenced to two months’ suspended imprisonment, for advocating terrorism, on the basis of a law which had just been adopted and had never yet been applied: the law of November 13, 2014 strengthening the provisions relating to the fight against terrorism.
In a context where hundreds of young French people were joining jihadist troops in Iraq and Syria, the law wanted to facilitate the repression of offenses of direct provocation to acts of terrorism or public apology for these acts, by removing them from the law on the press towards the penal code. This amounted to removing the reinforced protection enjoyed by the exercise of freedom of expression, on the grounds that fomenting terrorist acts, or justifying them, is not “expressing”, it is acting, and acting to destroy.
Curbing terrorist propaganda
This transfer to the penal code allowed an unprecedented wave of convictions after the massacre of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. Did the judges have too heavy a hand? Punishments were sometimes handed down to simple drunkards who shouted « Daesh lives » leaving a bar. The same excitement occurred again after the terrorist assassination of Samuel Paty in October 2020, then after the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel, while a wave of anti-Semitic remarks swept across social networks.
Beyond the question of condoning acts of terrorism, French law is today full of mechanisms that make it possible to block the dissemination of hateful ideologies: active surveillance of online exchanges, possibility of ordering the removal of certain content on sites or platforms, temporary closure of a place of worship due to comments made there, dissolution of an association to sanction the ideas or theories it propagates, etc. Some of these mechanisms come from the period of the state of emergency, decreed on November 13, 2015 after the Bataclan attack and extended until November 1, 2017. Others result from the law of August 24, 2021 reinforcing respect for the principles of the Republic, known as the “separatism law”.
-Defend freedom of expression
Abuses are certainly observable in the implementation of these systems. France, like all other democracies confronted with Islamist terrorism, has gradually moved from the fight against terrorist propaganda to tracking down signs of “radicalization” (religious or political) and then “separatism”, not without collateral damage to freedoms. individual and collective.
But is the freedom of expression of those who “are not Charlie” diminished? Judging by the plethora of positions calling for “respecting the sensitivity of Muslims” or treating the grieving demonstrators of January 11, 2015 as “zombie Catholics,” the answer is clearly negative. “It is odious to assassinate cartoonists, it is atrocious that a professor is beheaded for having made his students study their work, more…” But what? The arguments of those who “are not Charlie » are not subject to any censorship, everyone is free to read them.
The public authorities, on the other hand, are developing a vigorous counter-discourse, especially in the context of national education, to defend freedom of the press and the right to caricature. The educational institution deploys treasures of inventiveness and intelligence so that the massacre of January 7, then the assassination of Samuel Paty, are understood for what they are: attacks on what we want to be collectively. Free to criticize everything, including religions, free to make fun of it, free to buy any newspaper, as long as its content does not cross the limits set by the press law.
If the killing of January 7, 2015 marked a turning point for freedom of expression in our country, it is because it reminded us to what extent this freedom is precious, but also fragile and threatened from all sides, and that it must therefore be defended unconditionally.
