Who better to counsel us on freedom than the country that gave us the Reign of Terror?
Last month, French president Emmanuel Macron declared that “the so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.” Freedom, he continued, exists only where “there is a limit to my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework.” One’s liberty “cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or trashing the public space we all share.” Within that framework of “public order,” information must maintain “a relationship to truth.” What does this mean?
Macron’s remark was not made in isolation. It formed part of a broader defense of European platform regulation, including the Digital Services Act’s French applications—under which speech is to be judged by standards of harm, hate, and disinformation that magistrates and administrators define.
The confusion at the heart of Macron’s project is this: No serious champion of natural-rights doctrine has ever held that liberty is the absence of all restraint. The rights with which human beings are endowed by their Creator are equal rights; the exercise of one man’s right cannot consist in the destruction of another’s. Assault is not speech. The destruction of property is not argument. The American democracy at which Macron sneers has always distinguished the two, whereas what Macron omits is the difference between a limit that protects the equal rights of others and a limit that subjects opinion itself to a “common framework” whose content is fixed by the state. To equate an insult with a blow is to treat the individual mind as a species of public space, to be policed lest it be “trashed.” But that equation is always the premise of every censorship that has claimed to serve order.
The American principle, stated in the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment, rests on a different, stronger, ground. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent is no mere ritual; it is a judgment. Citizens cannot judge the measures of their rulers, or the opinions of their fellow citizens, if the rulers may determine in advance which opinions bear Macron’s proper “relationship to truth.” Truth, in political matters, is the goal toward which free argument moves when no party is authorized to close the argument by force. A people that surrenders the right to dispute that standard—or any standard—has already surrendered the capacity for self-government, according to America’s founders.
But Macron’s appeal to the freedom of others reverses the order of the Declaration. The Declaration places rights as prior to the “common framework.” The framework exists to secure already-existing rights rather than create them, and it may not redefine them in order to criminalize inconvenient speech. France’s own practice makes this reversal plain: Laws that punish “incitement” or group insult have been used against a fashion designer’s drunken remarks, a politician’s epithet for the Roma, a teenager’s characterization of a religion, and repeated prosecutions of public figures for opinions on immigration or Islam.
None of the above are cases of battery. They are cases in which the state has decided that certain propositions are incompatible with fraternity, and has therefore withdrawn the liberty to utter them. The motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is thereby rearranged: fraternity, as defined by the ruling class, limits liberty, and equality is the equal subjection of speakers to that limit. The Declaration’s teaching is the reverse: no government, foreign or domestic, may rightfully exercise powers that do not secure the equal rights of the governed.
There is, finally, the question of truth itself. To be sure, Macron is not wrong that much that circulates is false, malicious, or demagogic. But the remedy consistent with natural-rights doctrine is not a Ministry of Information but the cultivation of the capacity to distinguish. A free people corrects error by exposure—not by prohibition. A free people disciplines license by the same equal laws that protect every other right. When rulers undertake to guarantee the “relationship to truth,” they consistently guarantee the relationship of permitted speech to their own continuance in power. The rioting and destruction visible in French streets even as Macron bashed American freedom should serve to remind us that order imposed upon opinion fails to produce order in the city. It produces the oscillation between government tutelage and episodic rebellion that has marked the European tradition since the French Revolution substituted Rousseau’s “general will” for individual rights.
American “so-called” free speech is not the opposite of free speech. It is free speech: the security, against government, of the equal right to speak, to hear, and to judge, bounded only by the equal rights of others. Any regime that treats that security as a danger to be managed has already decided that consent is optional and that truth is whatever the “common framework” requires.
That decision may be called many things. A defense of freedom is not one of them.