Le Figaro: From Athenian Democracy to Social Media: When the Defenders of Free Speech Become Its Worst Enemies

By Jacques de Saint Victor

ESSAY — In Free Speech, the Danish jurist and essayist Jacob Mchangama investigates 2,500 years of liberty and its many enemies.

In 1644, the English poet John Milton, the celebrated author of Paradise Lost, published one of the finest pleas ever written against censorship and in favor of freedom of expression, Areopagitica. Truth, he explains, has nothing to fear from confrontation with error. In one of history’s ironies, this famous opponent of censorship would end up becoming the censor of Cromwell’s regime. This is what the Danish jurist and essayist Jacob Mchangama calls “Milton’s curse.” It forms the connecting thread of his imposing world history of freedom of expression, from Athenian democracy to social media. The whole story could be contained in this grim contradiction: we are always in favor of liberty for ourselves, but we are often tempted to deny it to others, particularly when our adversaries hold ideas that strike us as intolerable.

Mchangama’s undertaking is ambitious, at times uneven. From the isegoria of the Greeks of the fifth century BC to today’s digital activists, the road is long and strewn with obstacles. Two thousand five hundred years of liberty is a long stretch. Too long, perhaps. The French debate, for instance, is somewhat downplayed and “free speech” glorified. But it would be a mistake to close this hefty book on those reservations. For its chief value is to remind us how easily liberty can be lost. He insists on a crucial point: the most formidable enemies of free expression are no longer the ones we traditionally assume. The censorship of kings, of Churches, of authoritarian governments is easy to see and to condemn. But history teaches, alas, that the enemies of liberty are sometimes those who appear to be its defenders.

Should we then make the case for “free speech,” as this essay proposes? Mchangama’s book is familiar with the two great Western traditions. French freedom of expression is not American “free speech.” In 1881, France adopted a regime of “regulated liberty.” Already the Declaration of 1789, in its Article 11, affirms that every citizen may speak, write and publish freely, “save to answer for the abuse of this liberty in the cases determined by law.” Liberty is the principle, but certain “abuses of this liberty” may be punished by a judge. That is precisely the aim of the 1881 law organizing this liberal regime: an end to the regime of prior authorization (censorship), but possible sanctions after the fact in cases of defamation or insult.

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What followed largely proved her right. The greatest irony is that this offensive often unfolds in the name of the very values that once served to combat repression. We no longer censor to defend power (the Throne or the Altar), but to protect democracy, dignity or inclusion. The intentions have changed; the mechanisms less so.

That is the great lesson of this world history: censorship almost never returns these days announcing that it wants to abolish liberty. It claims to be saving liberty from its misuses. This repressive Janus has glorious antecedents. Milton wanted to free minds, except those of Catholics, and it was on that basis that he defended censorship. The revolutionaries of 1793 wanted to emancipate the people and convinced themselves that liberty is too precious to be left to priests and aristocrats. They instituted the Terror. Authoritarian regimes claimed to protect society against “fascist” subversion. Islamists mean to ban “insults to religion.” And certain zealous defenders of democracy come to see “fascists” behind every dissenting opinion. Hence the surprising vogue for censorship in certain so-called “progressive” circles. Will we ever escape “Milton’s curse”?

Translated from the original French.

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