Sat 18 September 2021:
A French court convicted a billboard owner to a €10,000 fine on Friday after he used a sign to mock COVID measures by portraying President Emmanuel Macron as Adolf Hitler.
Michel-Ange Flori announced on Twitter that he will appeal the court’s decision in Toulon, southern France.
“I can’t believe it,” he wrote. “The right to caricature was buried today in Toulon.”
Chers amis, Chers soutiens
Je n’arrive pas à y croire, le tribunal de manière inattendue s’est retiré immédiatement pour délibérer et me condamner à l’amende presque maximale de 10000 euros, nous faisons appel.
Le droit à la caricature a été enterré aujourd’hui à Toulon.— Flori Michel-Ange (@MichelFlori) September 17, 2021
Macron filed a lawsuit against Flori in late July after two billboards picturing him as the Nazi commander were erected, each measuring four meters by three meters.
Macron is depicted in a Nazi uniform with a little moustache, a lock on his forehead, and the abbreviation of the presidential movement LREM converted into a swastika on the posters. “Obey, get vaccinated,” says a message.
Michel-Ange Flori
It occurred two weeks after the president announced new restrictions, including the phased implementation of a COVID health card, required vaccines for health and care professionals, and the elimination of free COVID-19 testing unless a doctor prescribes them.
Prosecutor Laurent Robert had said in his indictment that the poster amounted to “an obvious desire to harm”.
Flori owns about 600 billboards in the southern Var département and keeps two of them for his personal use on which he puts “tweets in 4X3”, per his expression.
“Some people write on walls, I make posters”, he said, arguing his preferred mode of expression is “the oldest in the world”.
Since being sued, Flori has unveiled two new posters of Macron likening him to Louis XVI, France’s last monarch executed by guillotine, and Marshal Pétain, who negotiated France’s capitulation to Hitler in 1940 and led a government that collaborated with the Nazi regime.
Flori’s lawyer, Béranger Tourné, said after the ruling that “the right to caricature has been violated”.
“The president, so quick to defend freedom of expression (…) considers that it stops at his own august person,” he added.
The offence of “insulting the president of the Republic” was repealed in 2013 after a European Court of Human Rights ruling condemning France, but the head of state is protected from insult and public defamation like any ordinary citizen, even if prosecutions, sometimes perceived as an attack on freedom of expression, are rare.
Macron and Freedom of speech
French President Emmanuel Macron seems a worried man. He first proposed to reform Islam along French lines. Then after the vicious killing of a schoolteacher by a Muslim teenager, he extended France’s support to caricatures of the Prophet that most Muslims see as blasphemous.
High schools across France plan to circulate booklets with degrading images of the Prophet in order to affirm “the values of the Republic.”
Many Muslim countries erupted in protest. Criticism also appeared in the British and American press. Macron claimed he was misinterpreted.
France not ‘free-speech champion’: Amnesty
Last year November, Amnesty International accused the French government of not being the “champion of free speech that it likes to think it is,” criticizing recent rhetoric by the government as “shameful hypocrisy.”
“The French government’s rhetoric on free speech is not enough to conceal its own shameless hypocrisy,” said Marco Pirolini, a researcher in the rights group, adding that freedom of expression “means nothing unless it applies to everyone.”
NUMEROUS MEDIA OUTLETS REMOVE ARTICLES, CHANGE CONTENT ON MACRON’S ORDERS
He also referred to a court ruling on two men for “contempt” after they burned an effigy depicting Macron during a peaceful protest, as well as a bill being discussed in parliament that would criminalize the use of images of law enforcement officials on social media.
“It is hard to square this with the French authorities’ vigorous defense of the right to depict the Prophet Mohammed in cartoons.”
He stressed that Muslims’ freedom of expression and religion usually received scant attention in France under the guise of Republican universalism, underlining that in the name of secularism, Muslims in France were banned from wear religious symbols or dress in schools and public sector jobs.
“France’s record on freedom of expression in other areas is just as bleak. Thousands of people are convicted every year for ‘contempt of public officials’, a vaguely defined criminal offence that law enforcement and judicial authorities have applied in massive numbers to silence peaceful dissent,” Pirolini added.
Some expert believe this unfolding disaster must lie on Macron’s increasingly desperate wish to beat his explicitly anti-Islam rival Marine le Pen at her own game in presidential elections due in 2022.
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