Talk:Censorship in France

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Official vs. actual gov. position of censorship[edit]

This article states that the French gov. doesn't censor, given that it's a liberal democracy. That's probably the offical government position. But, for example, Bridgit Bardot was prosecuted for criticising Eid, a Muslim holiday in which animals are slaughtered. However you look at it, that definitely is censorship. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.61.44.63 (talk) 00:12, 24 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Merge Freedom of information in France here[edit]

Same subjects. Maybe we could rename the article, for the sake of NPOV, Freedom of press and censorship in France. Tazmaniacs 18:38, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... one is about state control of general speech, whilst the other is about access to government information. Entirely different approaches to the issue, really. I'm not sure if merging is particularly helpful, especially if the FOI section grows at all. Shimgray | talk | 09:19, 10 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Until when[edit]

I would be interesting to know until when the censored material was forbidden. For instance, "Le petit soldat" is not censored nowadays, I've seen on tv (although it was very late) and I think it's available on dvd. On the other hand, the book "suicide, mode d'emploi", of Claude Guillon and Yves Le Bonniec (could be translated as : "a suicide guide") is still forbidden nowadays.rysg 17:02, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Early history[edit]

I added a section discussing the extensive history of censorship in France extending back to the middle ages. There still needs to be a discussion of how the censorship practice was affected by the Revolution and what exactly survived. Ecphora (talk) 06:52, 15 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Toubon law[edit]

I have added a revised discussion of the Toubon law which in fact has significant censorship aspects to it as it, for example, forbids the use of certain language in certain situations. I have added references so as to avoid the (hypercritical, in my view) criticism that my prior statement this was culturally motivated was WP:OR. As such, this is an interesting and important (and far from routine) use of censorship by a modern government. Ecphora (talk) 07:46, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)
This section is still WP:OR in my opinion. Your sources describe what the Toubon law is but, unless I missed something, none of them describe it as a form of censorship. This section I think is quite controversial so it will have to be backed up with stronger sources. Laurent (talk) 08:23, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In your original wording, the article said that this law was an application of censorship. This is your personal point of view; better to keep things factual. You have so far not cited any source that claimed this law instituted a form of censorship.
The current wording is better, but contains factual errors. For instance, you claim that the law prohibits the use of trademarks based on foreign words, but you skipped the part of the sentence that says that it only applies to public bodies - government entities (personnes morales de droit public and so on). In fact, a great part of the Toubon law only constrains speech from the government and its agencies.
I note that we already have an article on Toubon Law with many details, including citations of court rulings and official reports. David.Monniaux (talk) 08:21, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Another question: in most developed countries, there are laws constraining commercial speech in advertisements and so on, why take only this one as "censorship"? David.Monniaux (talk) 09:03, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
On the question of WP:OR, the article on "Censorship" define it as "the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor." The Loi Toubon forbids the use of certain words (in a section you deleted). It is hardly WP:OR to state that this is a form of censorship. If a source is needed, the Swiss Interior Minister referred to the Toubon law "state censorship". (And its not just purely governmental speech, Art 14 also "applies to private corporate bodies on a public service assignment during the performance of this assignment".)
This is more than just a routine law regulating commercial speech such as prohibiting unproven promises of medical cures; this is a comprehensive state imposed regulation designed to achieve cultural ends, namely to stem the proliferation of foreign language deemed undesirable by the state. As such, it has strong similarities to laws forbidding undesirable political speech or obscenity.
Finally, the fact that much (but not all) of the Loi Toubon may censor governmental speech does not detract from that fact that it is nevertheless censorship. (Just like a certain recent administration has been accused of censoring governmental scientific speech.)
Having said that, I find the revised text acceptable. Ecphora (talk) 09:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The comment by the Interior Minister is about a very different issue, it's about the languages that should be taught in Swiss schools. Personally, I don't think that regulating the language used by governmental bodies is censorship and, without checking, I'm sure it's done by every countries in the world. However the reason I'm saying it's WP:OR is not because I agree or disagree with you, it's because there's simply no source discussing the law and calling it "censorship". Laurent (talk) 09:43, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know about the "private corporate bodies on a public service assignment during the performance of this assignment". It means that if, say, instead of running a bus service directly as a government service, the government gives this subsidized public service to a private company (or perhaps even creates a company under private law), then that company has to comply. Compliance in this case means that tickets, safety signs etc. must be in French (they can be translated into other languages).

In this respect, it looks more like a way of protecting users and customers from possible harm or misunderstandings than censorship.

Normally, censorship is when the government suppresses unpleasant news, content that shocks its morals, content that displease some politicians, content that contradicts its policies. The relationship with the Toubon law is tenuous at best. David.Monniaux (talk) 12:11, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Au contraire, the supression of any kind of speech to achieve any kind of cultural goal is censorship pure and simple.Seanwal111111 (talk) 17:43, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It is easy to find countless examples of philosophers, sociologists, etc. saying that suppressing political speech or speech that offends "morality" is censorship. You will be hard pressed to find any citation about software manuals and commercial documents. Or is it original research?
I therefore think your valuable remarks about software manuals should rather go into the Toubon Law article. (Though as a computing professional I note that I work with software manuals in English all the time, and that nobody ever tried to do anything about it.)
I note that none of the cited sources in this paragraph talk about "censorship"... In fact I've just done a search in JSTOR and there is no article that refers to the Toubon Law as censorship. David.Monniaux (talk) 19:17, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In Turkey until not too many years ago it was illegal to use the Kurdish language in a wide variety of public contexts (among other things it was illegal to use the Kurdish alphabet in print). The Turkish government passed those laws with social, cultural and political objectives in mind. Likewise today in France with respect to the English language. And in plain English, it's called government censorship. Seanwal111111 (talk) 21:38, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Your reasoning by analogy may have some value, but it is still original research. I'm still waiting for one serious, credible, notable source (say, an academic) saying that the Toubon Law is censorship. David.Monniaux (talk) 23:37, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I agree and I've removed the section for now. If it is notable that the Toubon Law is a form of censorship then you shouldn't have any problem finding a source for your statements. Putting sources together to reach a conclusion not stated in the sources is a synthesis. Laurent (talk) 02:19, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If you accept the analogy with Kurdish in Turkey, then I can satisfy your concern with an article entitled "Reproducing and Contesting Social Norms and Forms in Turkey", published in Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1469-9540, Volume 30, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1 – 5. The article contains the expression: "a situation of heavy State censorship of Kurdish language". In a similar vein, here's usage in a news article at PressEurop.EU: "Recently adopted in Bratislava, a law obliging Slovak citizens to express themselves in Slovak in public areas has prompted an outcry in Budapest, which views it as an infringement of the rights of Slovakia's Hungarian minority.... The establishment of Slovakian linguistic censorship has reinforced the position of the extreme-right party Jobbik [in Budapest]."
More directly on target, the following words are from an article about the advertising industry in France. They are published in the journal World Englishes, Volume 26 Issue 2 (year 2007), pages 170 - 190. The article is entitled ""Frenglish" for sale: multilingual discourses for addressing today's global consumer":
"[This article discusses] various efforts on the part of the French government to limit the public's exposure to English (e.g., 1994 Toubon Law) as well as the [advertising] industry's reaction to such intervention..... [We found] frustration with regards to what many of them [i.e. advertising industry workers] perceive as linguistic censorship. Others commented on the role of English as a link language in the industry, particularly for advertising agencies pitching their ideas to company clients and/or communicating with agencies in other countries."
BTW, I don't understand why not ALL of the French advertising industry workers perceive the law as linguistic censorship. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seanwal111111 (talk • contribs) 02:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Turkey issue is irrelevant. We are discussing France, not Turkey, and any analogy drawn between the two is certainly original research. The same applies to Slovakia. We are discussing a precise law, not whether, in the abstract, there are cases where linguistic restrictions of speech can be called censorship (I do believe there are).

As for your citation (doi:10.1111/j.1467-971X.2007.00500.x), I don't have access to World Englishes, so I'll only talk from your extract. A crucial policy in Wikipedia is that opinions are to be attributed to the proper parties. Certainly, the members of Parliament who voted the Toubon Law did not think they were creating censorship; and the Constitutional Council that validated the restrictions on advertising speech did not think it was allowing censorship. An introductory sentence like "According to Martin (2007), some in the French advertisement community consider that...." is in order.

Furthermore, the same policy states that when Wikipedia reports on opinions, it should keep a sense of proportions, and not give undue weight to opinions held only by a tiny minority. You are talking about the opinion of some unspecified proportion of advertisement employees, itself a tiny minority of Frenchmen. It's impossible to assert whether the criterion is validated.

Certainly, there is some loss of perspective that this topic should take so much room in the article whereas other actions of the French government, for which you'll find considerable more commentators stating that they were censorship (e.g. during the Algerian War), are covered sketchily. I suspect this is a kind of US-centric bias: actions against English are taken as antiamericanism. David.Monniaux (talk) 05:37, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This section is now becoming extremely misleading. Many sources are attached to it but all of them are either primary sources or are part of the editor's original research. I also agree with David that there may be a WP:UNDUE issue here, as the Toubon law is not notable at all for being a form of censorship. There are issue with freedom of speech in France, most notably on television and perhaps newspapers, but the Toubon law is far from being a major issue. This is just about preserving the national language which any sensible country in the world would try to do. Laurent (talk) 01:06, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if the Loi Toubon qualifies as an instance of censorship or not, but the comparison with the censorship of the Kurdish language in Turkey seems far-fetched at best: in the case of Turkey this is clearly an instance of the wider oppression of a cultural and linguistic minority. The Loi Toubon certainly oppresses no English-speaking minority in France. Neither does it prohibit the use of English in France, where English is spoken, taught, written, printed and sold everyday. It only attempts to control it (futilely, maybe) in some specific circumstances. CamsterE (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:06, 29 January 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Thinking of it in terms of a minority leads you astray. The goal in Turkey is to suppress certain cultural and linguistic behaviors, and propagate other behaviors, and the same is true in France. Also, Turkey legally suppress Kurdish only in some specific circumstances. It's illegal for a Turkish political party to distribute political campaign literature in Kurdish language (and recently Aysel Tuğluk was sentenced to a year in jail for violating this law). But at the same time, all forms of Kurdish culture of a non-political and entertainment kinds are legal, and in fact there is a Kurdish-language TV station in Turkey that is primarily financed by the government. In Turkey it's legal to use Kurdish alone in commercial communications, such as in shop signs and Kurdish music album covers. Whereas in France it is not legal to use Breton alone in shop signs or Breton music album covers. School teaching through the medium of the Breton language is prohibited by law from receiving French taxpayer funding, which isn't true under Turkish law for Kurdish. I think of all these laws as positively aiming to promote certain behaviors, not to suppress people. They use legal suppression of other behaviors to help the ones they like to prosper more.
Censorship is the supression of any kind of speech to achieve any kind of cultural goal. Seanwal111111 (talk) 01:14, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This law is very stupid and useless but I don't perceive it as censorship. It's not illegal to speak english in France, you know. If you go to France, you'll quickly notice that english is everywhere : in advertising, movie titles, songs...)
I'm pretty sure that Toubon didn't pass the law out of an ideology but only for marketing-favoritism reasons. My opinion (and it's only my opinion, not necessarily the thruth) is that some big french records and movies company pressured him for this law, to sell more of their sh...

Anyway, this law hasn't change a lot. The big national radios always favored the french rap or french "variété". The locals radio just don't respect the law (how could they find 60% of good french music ? Not in Johnny Halliday discographie) and fortunately they're not in trouble for that.
I've never heard of anyone being really in trouble because of the Toubon Law. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.214.209.41 (talk) 18:53, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

censoring less doesn't mean having more freedom...[edit]

france just has same amount of freedom as china..france government has less enemies(aka holocaust deniers), whole chinese government as more enemies

but regarding the freedom..france isn't anything better than communist china.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.212.122.76 (talk) 07:24, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of censored songs[edit]

The two song named in the aticle were not really "censored". They were not play on the national radio, like many others (Brassens for exemple). Those songs were available at records shops. Some rare songs ("mangez moi" by Billy the kick and "l'apologie" by Matmatah, for exemple) were justice cases. Groups were fined, but the records are still available in records shops and groups were singing them live in concert. 89.3.96.96 (talk) 16:04, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading section on historical memory law[edit]

I'm very confused by the section on the law on colonialism and how it caused historians to criticize the existence of such laws. As far as I recall the law was criticised for making the apology of colonialism -- in a country where many people feel colonialism is one among several roots of racial tension in France among ancient colonies' migrants and autochtons, and where colonialists and ex-colonialists are strongly associated with far right movements. People were shocked that children were going to be taught that colonialism had positive aspects -- it is quite obvious indeed that the French colonialists were more technologically advanced than the people they invaded but there has been bitter debate as to whom benefited the "positive aspects" (in short, apartheid was prevalent and so it was colonialists who benefited the advances and not the invaded people).

This is very opposite from other types of memory laws which essentially forbid denying the existence of a shameful behaviour on behalf of our ancestors, such as the Holocaust and the (massive, alas) participation of the French at this time in the discrimination of Holocaust victims. A better example would've been the discussions on the law forbidding denial of the Armenian Genocide. This caused controversy because people thought it was unnecessary to legislate over the whole of History and there wasn't such a strong risk of denial as there had been for the Holocaust.

I would hence suggest getting rid altogether of the reference to the 2005 law. It is a propaganda law, not a censorship law -- and it goes exactly against the spirit of existing memory censorship laws. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.40.67.73 (talk) 17:50, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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