This is how dictatorships begin.
Ten people were just found guilty in France for “cyberbullying” the country’s first lady, according to France24. These weren’t threats. Nor violence. Nor blackmail. It was speech — ugly, stupid, conspiratorial speech, in this writer’s opinion — aimed at a powerful public figure who sits at the very center of the French political class.
Let’s be clear: The claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron is secretly a man is absurd, unserious, and a distraction from real problems. What Macron allegedly has hiding in her skirt has little bearing on unchecked immigration, a brutal economy, or rampant crime.
But free societies don’t criminalize speech because it’s foolish or offensive. They tolerate it precisely because the alternative — empowering the state to decide what mockery, speculation, or ridicule is allowed — is the first step toward something far darker.
And that’s the uncomfortable question hanging over Europe right now.
How did the continent that gave the world the Enlightenment, that stood shoulder to shoulder with the Allies against genuine totalitarianism, arrive at a place where police and courts are deployed to punish online insults?
When governments start policing thoughts and jokes in the name of “harm,” they aren’t protecting democracy so much as they’re crossing a line toward hollowing it out.
A Paris court has now crossed that line, and that should make anyone who values free expression deeply uneasy.
On Monday, judges handed down guilty verdicts against 10 individuals (eight men and two women) accused of “cyberbullying” Macron, for circulating crude, false, and conspiratorial claims about her gender and sexuality — speech that some may find offensive, yes, but nonviolent and political in nature.
And these punishments were not symbolic wrist slaps. Defendants were ordered to undergo mandatory “cyberbullying awareness” programs, while others received suspended prison sentences of up to eight months, which is a rather remarkable escalation for online speech offenses involving no threats and no physical harm.
The message from the state was unmistakable: Say the wrong thing about the wrong person, and the justice system will intervene.
In justifying the convictions, the court cited comments it deemed “particularly degrading, insulting, and malicious,” including speculation about transgender identity and even lurid accusations of pedocriminality due to the 24-year age gap between Brigitte and her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron.
Yet by positioning itself as the arbiter of acceptable opinion and tone, the French government has done far more damage than any internet troll ever could by normalizing the idea that political speech, however distasteful or pointless, is no longer protected when it embarrasses those in power.
It gets worse when you see what some of Macron’s family had to say about this ordeal.
According to France24, Brigitte Macron’s daughter, Tiphaine Auzière, told the court that the harassment caused a “deterioration” in her mother’s life, explaining that “she cannot ignore the horrible things said about her,” and that the emotional toll rippled outward to the rest of the family.
That may be humanly understandable, but it is a catastrophic standard for criminal punishment.
If the threshold for state intervention is whether a powerful public figure can emotionally “ignore” speech, then free expression becomes entirely contingent on temperament. Had Brigitte Macron possessed thicker skin, would no crime have occurred? If the remarks had been laughed off instead of internalized, would the same words suddenly become lawful? This is psychological guesswork masquerading as “law.”
Worse still, this standard is infinitely expandable. Any politician, spouse, or government-adjacent figure can now claim subjective distress as grounds to silence critics, satirists, or online provocateurs. Once personal discomfort becomes the metric for criminality, speech rights no longer belong to the public — they belong to the most thin-skinned people closest to power.
And this isn’t some hypothetical slippery slope. Europe has already slid down it.
We’ve watched police detain citizens not for shouting slogans or threatening violence, but for standing silently in public with the “wrong” thoughts. In at least one case, a woman was questioned and arrested for quietly praying outside an abortion center, accused of committing a crime without speaking a word. When the state claims the authority to punish what someone might be thinking, the distinction between free society and managed obedience isn’t slipping — it’s already collapsed.
Make no mistake, this is totalitarianism in its modern, sanitized form. No jackboots, no gulags, just bureaucrats, courts, and euphemisms like “harm,” “safety,” and “dignity” used to justify policing speech, belief, and eventually conscience itself.
If Europe’s political class cannot tolerate mockery, offense, or even silent dissent without reaching for the handcuffs, then it has forgotten the very freedoms it once claimed to defend. And anyone who still cares about a genuinely free society should find that far more alarming than a handful of crude internet posts.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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