History of Censorship in France

Description: Western European republic

Significance: Although France has one of Europe’s oldest republican traditions, its governments have frequently curbed free expression because of the pressures of national security and changing public notions of decency

Modern France’s ideas about freedom of expression go back to the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press were formally incorporated in the Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. However, as the Revolution progressed and its leaders came to the conclusion that its survival depended on internal unity and universal loyalty, various revolutionary regimes began implementing exceptions to the principles embodied in the Declaration. In August, 1791, for example, journalists who preached disobedience to the law or defiance of public authorities were subject to prosecution for libel. Later, after the execution of King Louis XVI, revolutionary authorities imposed the death penalty for advocating the reestablishment of the monarchy in either speech or print. During the tenure of Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety (1793-1794), the death penalty was implemented for other expressions of political opinion, such as threatening the Republic’s unity and integrity, proposing the dissolution of the National Convention, or advocating peace on terms disadvantageous to France.

After the downfall of Robespierre in July, 1794, the Directory reaffirmed total freedom of the press and speech. But it also quickly backed away from this position as the realities of governing France in a revolutionary environment became apparent. In 1796, for example, it reimposed the death penalty for anyone advocating dissolution of the government, reestablishment of the monarchy, reestablishment of the constitutions of 1791 or 1793, or attacks on private property. Indeed, the notion that freedom of expression must be curbed in order to ensure the survival of the government that guaranteed it was born during the French Revolution, injecting a paradox into French democracy that would endure.

The Napoleonic Era

Napoleon Bonaparte, who took control of France in December, 1799, had little use for freedom of expression. He always argued that his coup d’état of 1799 had been necessary to restore order and stability and that in order to maintain stability, silence must be imposed on all political factions and potential troublemakers. He silenced parliamentary debate, thereby reducing opportunities for expressing political differences, and he implemented a system of national referendums that inhibited the development of public opinion. To restrict freedom of the press, which he considered a threat to the security of the state, he reduced the number of newspapers in Paris to four and prohibited those that did exist from covering political topics. Later, in 1809, he created a board of censors to oversee each newspaper and had his police confiscate those that violated his strict guidelines.

Restoration of the Monarchy

Restrictions on freedom of expression were relaxed after Napoleon’s final downfall in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty under King Louis XVIII. However, when Louis’ brother Charles X ascended the throne in 1824, the government launched new assaults on freedom of expression in the name of restoring the institutions of the Old Regime. Charles implemented, for example, a law against sacrilege that made certain sacrilegious acts in churches punishable by long terms in prison and even execution. Charles also enacted a severe press law that severely hampered newspaper publishers and the distributors of pamphlets and circulars. Neither measure was enforced effectively but they nevertheless suggested a serious intolerance to ideas considered incompatible with the conservative agenda of Charles X’s regime.

The attempt by Charles X to restore the Old Regime eventually provoked an opposition from other sectors of the French elite—especially those who had benefited from the innovations introduced by the Revolution—and led to his overthrow in July, 1830. Many men who played important roles in this event had contributed to newspapers that fought for freedom of the press during the Bourbon Restoration. As a result, the early years of the July Monarchy—as the regime of newly installed King Louis Philippe was called—witnessed a dramatic reduction in the restrictions placed on freedom of expression. This change did not last, however. Under the pressure of several popular insurrections and mounting criticism of the regime, the July Monarchy passed the “September Laws” of 1835 that severely reduced freedom of the press. Any newspaper that incited revolution, fomented hatred of the king, demanded a change of dynasty, praised the fallen Bourbon dynasty, called for a republic, attacked property rights, or questioned any law might be suspended from publication. “Caution money”—fees that newspapers had to deposit with the authorities to receive publishing licenses—was also dramatically increased. The purpose of this law was seemingly to eliminate all newspapers that opposed the July Monarchy; many of them were forced to cease publication as a result. Other segments of the opposition press learned to sidestep the new law by such techniques as substituting implication and innuendo for direct attacks on the regime. Ultimately, the September Laws probably did more harm than good to the July Monarchy by alienating many former liberal supporters of the regime.

The Revolution of 1848

This alienation peaked in February, 1848, with the outbreak of a new revolution, which overthrew the July Monarchy and established the Second Republic. As had been the case in 1830, this revolutionary change in regime temporarily eased restrictions that had been placed on the press over the previous fifteen years. But the Revolution of 1848 also set the stage for the rise of a truly popular political movement that threatened upper-middle-class conceptions of private property and responsible government by provoking a conservative counterattack that not only resulted in renewed restrictions on freedom of the press and other forms of political expression, but led to Louis Napoleon’s rise to power. Elected president of the Second Republic in December, 1848, Napoleon used this office to seize personal and exclusive control of the government in December, 1851. His new regime, the Second Empire, resurrected many of the repressive and manipulative measures first invented by Napoleon I: plebiscites, a powerless legislature, legal persecution of political dissidents, and censorship of the press and other forms of literary expression. It was during the Second Empire, for example, that author Victor Hugo was forced into exile for his political views and saw several of his writings that were critical of Louis Napoleon banned in France.

Nonpolitical authors were persecuted on moral grounds as well during this period. Gustave Flaubert’s famous novel, Madame Bovary, first appeared in serial form in the literary journal the Revue de Paris in 1856. Although the editors of the journal tried to edit the piece to appease the censors, Flaubert was still prosecuted for “offenses against morality and religion” by the government in 1857. His sensational trial captured the attention of the nation due to the angry and eloquent exchanges between the lawyers from both sides. In the end, Flaubert was acquitted and his novel appeared shortly thereafter in book form to both critical praise and popular acclaim. Charles Baudelaire was also unsuccessfully prosecuted for violating public morality for his 1857 collection of poems Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal).

The Third Republic

Although Napoleon III reduced many of his restrictions against free expression of political ideas after 1868, popular dissatisfaction with his regime combined with the disastrous French performance in the Franco-Prussian War to lead to his overthrow in September, 1870. After a brief period of chaos, his regime was ultimately replaced by the Third Republic, a parliamentary government that would control the country until 1940. Many restrictions that had formerly hamstrung the press were removed and there resulted a lively and colorful atmosphere of free political expression. In 1898 the author Émile Zola was forced into exile to avoid prosecution for writing “J’Accuse,” an article in which he charged that the 1894 espionage trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been a travesty of justice. The notoriety of this episode, however, came from the fact that prosecutions of this type had become rare by the late nineteenth century. Although occasionally lapsing into irresponsibility and libel, political discussion—and artistic expression—during the Third Republic was normally unrestrained by the government.

World War II and Its Aftermath

France’s fall to Germany in June, 1940, ended this situation. Throughout the Nazi-occupied northern part of the country, the press was absolutely controlled and public expression of ideas was severely restricted. In the southern zone, the collaborationist Vichy regime placed similar restrictions on the press and public opinion. Moreover, the Vichy regime attempted to censor mass culture in an effort to halt what it regarded as the “moral decline” of the country. Examples of such attempts at censorship included an attack on “swing” music as a negative influence on the morals of youth and prohibiting the novelist André Gide from lecturing in 1941 on the grounds that he was a “prophet of hedonism.”

The war years proved to be only a temporary break in France’s development of free speech under the Third Republic. After the war ended, a multitude of political parties of diverse ideological persuasions in the Fourth and Fifth republics guaranteed that political expression, both in speech and in the press, would flourish virtually without restriction. Moral censorship also became lax in modern France. Female nudity, for example, has been frequently employed in advertising. Erotic movies have also appeared regularly on television without editing.

During the 1980’s French authorities expressed some concern about the spread of pornography and implemented several indirect measures, such as the creation of the “X” rating for pornographic films judged inappropriate for individuals under the age of eighteen, to restrict their proliferation. Some serious filmmakers worried that this rating system might be used against erotic films of artistic worth but such did not prove to be the case. In general, modern France seems to have come to terms with the paradox introduced during the French Revolution and came to serve as a model for Western democracies in terms of government tolerance of dissenting political opinions and free artistic and intellectual expression.

Bibliography

No comprehensive history of censorship in France has been published in English. A general history of France that discusses censorship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is Gordon Wright’s France in Modern Times (5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Aspects of censorship in specific historical periods are covered in Louis Bergeron’s France Under Napoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny’s The Bourbon Restoration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967), David Pinkney’s Decisive Years in France: 1840-1847 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), John Merriman’s The Agony of the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), Stuart Campbell’s The Second Empire Revisited: A Study in French Historiography (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), R. D. Anderson’s France, 1870-1914: Politics and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), and John Ardagh’s France in the 1980s (New York: Penguin, 1983).