What France Doesn’t Understand About Free Speech
France does not guarantee the same speech protections that Americans take for granted under the First Amendment.
Key points
- Yesterday, the Union of Mosques of France, one of the groups that had filed a complaint against Houellebecq, issued a statement invoking the attack as an illustration of the danger of his rhetoric.
- In France, the standard is lower: Incitement may be punishable even if it’s merely implicit, its intended effect isn’t imminent, and it’s unlikely to have any effect whatsoever.
- In the United States, the legal standard for incitement holds that speech must be aimed at producing imminent unlawful action, and is likely to produce it.
“There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, in short, Bataclans in reverse.” He was referring to a 2015 attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, one of several acts of jihadist terrorism in the 2010s that collectively killed hundreds in France.
Additional details
- The fact that he now faces the possibility of criminal charges should concern anyone who professes to care about the free exchange of ideas.
- On Tuesday, a judge placed Michel Houellebecq, one of the country’s most significant living writers, under investigation for his alleged “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence,” an accusation that stems from comments he made about Muslims several years ago.
- “I believe that the wish of the population with French roots, as the phrase goes, is not for Muslims to assimilate,” Houellebecq continued, “but for them to stop stealing from and assaulting them, in short, for the violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and people.
- “The incriminated remarks have no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly, and therefore fall within the bounds of freedom of opinion and expression,” they said in a statement to the French media.
- On October 23, a 39-year-old gunman drove through the communes of Trappes and La Verrière, outside Paris, and fired a submachine gun at passersby whom he believed to be African or Muslim, according to prosecutors.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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