Mr. President, dear colleagues, for writing The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn had to leave his country and go into exile in the United States. For challenging British colonization, Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison. Today, it is not in Moscow that the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been arrested, but here, in Emmanuel Macron’s France. It is not in Cuba that Elon Musk is being prevented from making Twitter a space for freedom, but here, in Brussels, in Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe. Here, in the civilization that should protect freedom of expression — better yet, that invented it — Europeans are being silenced, intimidated, and punished. It is here that the right is being silenced, censored on social networks, harassed by the justice system, associations, and even banks.
It is in my country, France, that the television channel C8 has just been banned from broadcasting in near-total silence. It is in my country that young influencers are being banned from Instagram without any explanation. It is in my country, the country of human rights, that the public audiovisual service, funded by our taxes, decides who gets to speak, what we talk about, and how we talk about it.
And yet, I tell you, you do not erase opinions by suppressing their expression. The more you attack us, the more numerous we will become. You can censor us, but you cannot censor reality. What we cannot see on television because of you, we see in our streets every day. You will not stop Europeans from thinking, you will not stop Europeans from living, and you will not stop Europeans from telling you: ‘We are not criminals, we are dissidents.’
We will always prefer Tocqueville to Thierry Breton, Elon Musk to Ursula von der Leyen, and freedom to censorship.
