In the U.S.A., we tend to think of the right to freedom of speech as absolute, deep in our bones, inscribed in our Constitution. Americans pay lip-service to the idea that even someone who has something hateful to say has the right to say it. Of course, in real life, there are plenty of examples of curbs on freedom of speech, from school principals not allowing certain t-shirts to Spanish-speakers not being allowed to speak their native language at work. (My brother was all for the no-foreign-language-speaking rule, and was nonplussed when I pointed out that under his rule, I couldn't speak English to my own family in public here.)
In France freedom of speech has a lot of limitations. Brigitte Bardot had to pay 15,000 euros for "inciting racial hatred" when she wrote in a newsletter of her animal-rights foundation that Muslim ritual slaughter of animals was repulsive and that "we're tired of being pushed around by all that population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its behavior." [Il y en a marre d'être menés par le bout du nez par toute cette population qui nous détruit, détruit notre pays en imposant ses actes.] Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National has been forced 18 times to pay fines for things he has said, including calling Holocaust gas chambers a "detail" in the story of World War II. Television personality Eric Zemmour was fined more than € 9000 for saying that "French people of immigrant descent are stopped by the police more often because most drug dealers in France are blacks and Arabs... that's a fact" [les Français issus de l'immigration étaient plus contrôlés que les autres parce que la plupart des trafiquants sont Noirs et Arabes ... c'est un fait]. In fact, collecting any statistics on ethnic groups has been expressly forbidden by French law since 1798.
Web censorship is a fact in France too. The American website RateMyProfessors has "grades" for more than one million teachers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.; an equivalent French site, www.note2be.com, attracted thunder and lightning, as the French say, from the French teachers' unions and the education minister himself and was shut down almost immediately. When the site moved to Brazil, the French government forced its suspension from French browsers. A similar site for evaluating French doctors, www.note2bib.com, suffered the same fate. And the site internetcopwatch, which published photos and names of French policemen accused of acting as agents provocateurs in demonstrations, was shut down by the Minister of the Interior himself after only a few weeks.
Although this censorship seems strange to Americans, one of the reasons for it is that the French have a long memory. In World War II, anonymous denunciations to the Gestapo caused great bitterness and since then there is no great support in France for anonymous criticism. In French, an anonymous informer is called a corbeau (crow).
