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1. Source of the legal provision

Article 24 bis of the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 29 July 1881 [Loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la liberté de la presse] as amended by Article 38 of Law No. 2021-1109 of 24 August 2021 [loi no. 2021-1109 du 24 août 2021 – art. 38]. Available in the original language via: Légifrance; <https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000043982451>

2. Legal provision in English

Anyone who contests, by any of the means set out in Article 23,[1] the existence of one or more crimes against humanity as defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945,[2] and committed either by members of an organisation declared a criminal pursuant to Article 9 of the said Statute,[3] or by a person found guilty of such crimes by a French or international court, will be liable to one year of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 Euro. The same punishment will be imposed on anyone who denies, minimises or grossly trivialises, by any of the means set out in Article 23, the existence of a crime of genocide other than those mentioned in the first paragraph of this Article, another crime against humanity, a crime of enslavement or exploitation of a person forced into slavery or a war crime as defined in Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court signed in Rome on 18 July 1998 and in Articles 211-1 to 212-3, 224-1 A to 224-1 C and 461-1 to 461-31 of the Criminal Code, when: 1.° The crime has led to a conviction by a French or international court; When the acts referred to in this article are committed by a person acting in a public capacity or entrusted with a public service function in the exercise or on the occasion of the exercise of their functions or mission, the penalties are increased to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 Euro. […]

3. Legal Provision in the original language

Seront punis d’un an d’emprisonnement et de 45 000 € d’amende ceux qui auront contesté, par un des moyens énoncés à l’article 23, l’existence d’un ou plusieurs crimes contre l’humanité tels qu’ils sont définis par l’article 6 du statut du tribunal militaire international annexé à l’accord de Londres du 8 août 1945 et qui ont été commis soit par les membres d’une organisation déclarée criminelle en application de l’article 9 dudit statut, soit par une personne reconnue coupable de tels crimes par une juridiction française ou internationale. Seront punis des mêmes peines ceux qui auront nié, minoré ou banalisé de façon outrancière, par un des moyens énoncés à l’article 23, l’existence d’un crime de génocide autre que ceux mentionnés au premier alinéa du présent article, d’un autre crime contre l’humanité, d’un crime de réduction en esclavage ou d’exploitation d’une personne réduite en esclavage ou d’un crime de guerre défini aux articles 6,7 et 8 du statut de la Cour pénale internationale signé à Rome le 18 juillet 1998 et aux articles 211-1 à 212-3,224-1 A à 224-1 C et 461-1 à 461-31 du code pénal, lorsque : 1.° Ce crime a donné lieu à une condamnation prononcée par une juridiction française ou internationale; Lorsque les faits mentionnés au présent article sont commis par une personne dépositaire de l’autorité publique ou chargée d’une mission de service public dans l’exercice ou à l’occasion de l’exercice de ses fonctions ou de sa mission, les peines sont portées à trois ans d’emprisonnement et à 75 000 euros d’amende. […]

4. Key Points

  • France was one of the first countries worldwide to explicitly criminalise (among others) Holocaust denial in 1990.[4] The denial ban does not require the act to be conducted in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred.
  • The law initially applied only to crimes against humanity under the jurisdiction of the International Military Tribunal, but was later expanded to cover statements relating to mass crimes recognised by an international or French court.
  • The basic sanction for Holocaust denial may include imprisonment of up to one year and a fine of up to 45,000 Euro.
  • Even before the explicit criminalization of Holocaust denial, such statements were prosecuted by means of more general offenses, and subjected to civil lawsuits.
  • Recent discussion focuses on legislative attempts to enlarge the scope of the provision to include statements concerning the Armenian genocide and colonial slavery.

5. Background

The negation of crimes against humanity committed during the Second World War has been criminalised in France by the so-called Loi Gayssot in 1990 which added Article 24 bis in the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 29 July 1881. Importantly, the provision does not refer to “denial” but allows the mere “contesting” of the existence of the Holocaust to suffice, thereby demonstrating the intention to ban any negationist statement, be it total or partial, conditional or interrogative.[5] The requirement that the crime must have been committed by members of an organisation declared criminal pursuant to Article 9 of the London Charter, or by a person found guilty of such crimes by a French or international court, limits the range of relevant historical crimes to Nazi crimes. Since the law does not globally refer to all crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Military Tribunal but only to the contestation of crimes against humanity, it also does not cover one of the most notorious massacres committed by Nazi forces against French civilians in Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.[6] Before the explicit criminalisation, negationist statements had been prosecuted under the offence of racial defamation, which had been adopted in 1972.[7] However, convictions on this basis had been rare, as the intention to racially discriminate is difficult to prove.[8] Negationist statements had often been disguised as pseudo-historic publications, further complicating indictments.[9] In the years following the Loi Gayssot, parliamentarians demonstrated an increased interest in passing provisions concerning historical events – ranging from the recognition of the Armenian genocide[10] to the recognition of the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity.[11] This development culminated in a short-lived and highly controversial law, which, among others, provided for school curricula to recognise the positive role of French colonialism.[12] The legislative activism in the field of public history and collective memory sparked strong criticism by historians and intellectuals.[13] The critics who united behind the rallying cry “Freedom for history” maintained that history was not a legal subject and the parliament and the judiciary were overstepping their competences if they were to take up the task to define historical truth.[14] Their call for an abrogation of these laws, known as lois mémorielles, was subsequently supported by a group of law professors, who claimed that the “communitarian logic contradicts the case law of the Constitutional Council which precludes the recognition of collective rights”.[15] However, the criticism was not unanimous. Some researchers pointed out that by attacking so-called memory laws in general, the opponents risked losing sight of the specificities of the Loi Gayssot which might be justifiable.[16] Concerning Holocaust denial, one historian refused to consider it “scandalous that politics should enforce essential concepts that are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.[17] In 2016, the Constitutional Council upheld the Loi Gayssot as a proportionate restriction of the freedom of speech since negationist statements “constitute in their very nature an incitement to racism and antisemitism”.[18] Additionally, some scholars consider the provision to safeguard democratic traditions against National-Socialist ideology.[19] By implementing EU Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA (hereafter ‘EU FD 2008’),[20] the scope of Article 24 bis was  enlarged in 2016 to cover the negation, minimisation and gross trivialisation of any genocide, crime against humanity, crime of enslavement or of the exploitation of enslaved persons and war crimes.[21] In 2017, the Constitutional Council upheld the extension insofar as the provision required the relevant historical crime to be established by domestic or international court judgment. In contrast, it held unconstitutional the alternative condition according to which the relevant statement was also criminal if it incited to violence or hatred, even where the relevant crime was not established by a court. The court found this second alternative made the offence unpredictable.[22]

6. Application

The judicial fight against Holocaust denial in France dates back to the early post-war years. In particular, publications by Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier in the late 1940s and early 1950s called into question the murderous purposes of the gas chambers.[23] Bardèche’s books primarily aimed to vindicate the Vichy regime and to attack the Résistance. In his case, the prosecution proved ingenious when it filed charges not based on defamation but on the law against the apology of crimes.[24] This provision was rarely used, as its original purpose had been to combat anarchist press outlets in the 1890s.[25] Bardèche was sentenced to one year in prison by the appellate court, overriding the scepticism of the trial judge who had argued that it was “not his role to assess the value or validity of historical or political theses”.[26] Similar hesitations to delve into historiographic methodology were visible in the Paris Court of Appeal’s judgement on a civil lawsuit against Robert Faurisson in 1983. The literature professor had spread negationist theses in the mainstream media and later established himself as a preeminent figure in the international scene of Holocaust denialism.[27] The court convicted Faurisson for the harmful consequences of his remarks, holding that they incited violence and rehabilitated Nazi crimes. However, the ruling refused to deconstruct his method as “accusations of carelessness levelled against him lack relevance and are not sufficiently established.”[28] Despite his conviction, Faurisson readily used these passages to misrepresent the ruling as a judicial acknowledgement of his work.[29] Jean-Marie Le Pen, who unified right-wing groups under his party “Front National” in 1972, made negationism a hallmark of his political extremism.[30] A civil lawsuit was successfully levelled against him for dismissing the Holocaust as “a point of detail of the history of the Second World War” in 1987. Repeating the statement in 2015 earned him a criminal conviction under the Loi Gayssot.[31] Jurisprudence has been deliberate in stressing that Article 24 bis of the Law of 29 July 1881 does not impede historical research disputing “the number of victims of the extermination policy in a particular concentration camp”.[32] Nonetheless, the Court of Cassation found, in a case involving a defendant who associated Auschwitz with 125,000 deaths, that “grossly underestimating the number of victims constitutes the offence when committed in mauvaise fois [bad faith].[33]

7. Controversies

The above-mentioned decision of the Court of Cassation[34] on the gross underestimation of victim numbers in case of bad faith sparked debates in scholarship about whether the court narrowed criminal liability by requiring a subjective element.[35] Some authors stressed that such a requirement could only be applied to the minimisation, but not any other form of contestation of the Holocaust.[36] Others emphasised that bad faith is traditionally presumed in the area of press offenses.[37] A majority of scholars hence appear to be of the view that a conviction does not require proof that the speaker had been conscious of the falsity of his claims.[38] Similarly, the above-mentioned 2017 Constitutional Council decision,[39] which ultimately limited the criminalisation of negationist statements to mass crimes that have been the subject of a court decision, sparked fierce controversies. Scholars criticized that this ruling primarily and arbitrarily excluded the Armenian genocide, which itself has not been the subject of a court decision.[40] Already in earlier judgements, the Constitutional Council had censured the legislation against the denial of the Armenian genocide and which was, as a consequence, praised by the Turkish government.[41] These judgements were criticised for disfavouring the memory of the Armenian diaspora of France, which, with its 600.000 members, is one of the largest in the world,[42] and they induced the media to examine peculiar ties between a Constitutional Council judge and Turkish institutions.[43] Likewise, the requirement of a court decision practically decriminalises the contestation of colonial slavery; a historic crime which is, yet, explicitly mentioned by Article 24 bis Law on the Freedom of the Press. In light of such legislative inconsistency provoked by the decision of the Constitutional Council, a group of lawmakers called on the government to modify the law in a way that effectively includes negationist statements on the slave trade and colonial slavery.[44]

8. Further Reading

  • Rueda, ‘A certain idea of France’s past: Marine Le Pen’s history wars’ [2022] Volume 24, Issue 4, European Politics and Society pp. 445–460 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23745118.2022.2058751>.
  • M. Sadowski, Intersections of Law and Memory. Influencing Social Perceptions of the Past, Routledge, 2024.
  • G. Shields, ‘French revisionism on trial: The case of Robert Faurisson’, [1991] Volume 25, Issue 1, Patterns of Prejudice, pp. 86–88, <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0031322X.1991.9970068>.
  • Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 1993.
  • L. Weaver, N. Delpierre, L. Boissier, ‘Holocaust Denial and Governmentally Declared “Truth”: French and American Perspectives’ [2009] Volume 41, Texas Tech Law Review, pp. 495-517.
[1] The following means are listed in Article 23 Loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la liberté de la presse: speeches, shouts or threats made in public places or meetings, or by writings, printed material, drawings, engravings, paintings, emblems, images or any other written, spoken or pictorial material sold or distributed, offered for sale or exhibited in public places or meetings, or by placards or posters exposed to public view, or by any public communication by electronic means. [2] Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal defines crimes against humanity as follows: “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.” [3] The NSDAP, the Gestapo, the SD and SS were declared to be criminal organizations by the International Military Tribunal, see Judgement of the International Military Tribunal, 30 September and 1 October 1946, accessible via The Avalon Project, Yale School of Law <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judorg.asp>. [4] To the author’s knowledge, France was the second country to adopt an explicit ban on Holocaust denial after Israel did so in 1986, see Israeli Denial of Holocaust (Prohibition) Law 5746-1986. [5] N. Droin, ‘L’article 24 bis sanctionnant le délit de négationnisme: toujours discuté, toujours discutable?’ in T. Hochmann, P. Kasparian (eds), L’extention du délit de négationnisme (2019), p. 62. [6] Accordingly, a court in Paris was unable to convict a man for charges of calling into question the massacre, which qualified as a war crime but lacked the political, religious or racial motives for it to constitute a crime against humanity; see: H. Abalo, ‘Le négationniste Vincent Reynouard relaxé pour des propos tenus sur le massacre d’Oradour-sur-Glane’ (franceinfo, 25 November 2020) <https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/nouvelle-aquitaine/haute-vienne/negationniste-vincent-reynouard-relaxe-propos-tenus-massacre-oradour-glane-1898836.html>; already in 2011, a member of parliament had pointed out the lack of protection for the memory of this  event, see: M. Boulestin, Assemblée Nationale, Les comptes rendus de la session [Session reports of the National Assembly], 22 December 2011 <https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/cri/2011-2012/20120094.asp>. [7] Droin, 2019, p. 59, see above note 5. [8] Ibid., p. 60. [9] Ibid., p. 60. [10] Loi No. 2001-70 du 29 janvier 2001. [11] Loi No. 2001-434 du 21 mai 2001. [12] Loi No.2005-158 du 23 février 2005. [13] Among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who was one of the most outspoken public figures in the fight against negationism in France. [14] ‘Liberté pour l‘histoire’ Liberation (13 December 2005) <https://www.liberation.fr/societe/2005/12/13/liberte-pour-l-histoire_541669/>. [15] Cited from S. Tomei, ‘Lois Mémorielles et dislocation de la République’, [2007] No. 276, Humanisme, p. 14. [16] See S. Tomei, ‘Lois Mémorielles et dislocation de la République’, [2007] No. 276, Humanisme, p. 16. [17] ‘Faut-il abroger les lois mémorielles?’, L’Express (2 February 2006) <https://www.lexpress.fr/societe/faut-il-abroger-les-lois-memorielles_483148.html>. [18] Conseil constitutionnel [Constitutional Council], Décision No 2015-512 QPC, 8 January 2016. [19] Droin, 2019, p. 65 see above note 5. [20] Already in 2010, a government official remarked on the necessity to make adaptations on existing the hate speech legislation due to the demand of the EU FD 2008, see Question écrit parlementaire [written parliamentary question], No. 56575, response published on 5 January 2010, accessible via the website of the Assmblée Nationale <https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q13/13-56575QE.htm>. [21] Article 173, Loi No. 2017-86 du 27 janvier 2017 relative à l’égalité et à la citoyenneté. [22] Conseil Constitutionnel [Constitutional Council], Décision n° 2016-745 DC, 26 January 2017. [23] J.-M. Dreyfus, ‘Les procès de Maurice Bardèche (1948-1954) Combats pour l’honneur de la Résistance ou premiers procès du négationnisme?’, [2022] Volume 155, No. 3, 20 & 21. Revue d’histoire, p. 43. [24] Ibid., p. 51; the criminalisation of the apology of (certain grave) crimes is – as it has been already at the time of the process against Bardèche – included in Article 24 Loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la liberté de la presse, see for the version of Article 24 in force during the time of the process: Journal Officiel de la République Française [Official Journal of the French Republic], Volume 25, No. 338, 13 December 1893. [25] Dreyfus, 2022, p. 51, see above note 23. [26] Ibid., p. 53. [27] A. Nossiter, ‘Robert Faurisson, Holocaust Denier Prosecuted by French, Dies at 89’, New York Times (22 October 2018) <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/obituaries/robert-faurisson-dead.html>. [28] Cited from T. Hochmann, ‘Faurisson, ‘falsificateur de la jurisprudence’?’, [2011], Volume 61, Droit et Cultures, pp. 235-256. [29] T. Hochmann, ‘Faurisson, ‘falsificateur de la jurisprudence’?’, [2011], Volume 61, Droit et Cultures, pp. 235-256. [30] V. Igounet, ‘Une tradition extrémiste: le négationnisme’, [1999] Volume 166, No. 2, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, p. 8. [31] ‘Jean-Marie Le Pen définitivement condamné pour ses propos sur les chambres à gaz’, Le Monde (27 March 2018) <https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2018/03/27/jean-marie-le-pen-definitivement-condamne-pour-ses-propos-sur-les-chambres-a-gaz_5277072_1653578.html>. [32] Cour de Cassation, Chambre criminelle [Court of Cassation, criminal chamber], 17 June 1997, Bulletin criminel 1997 No. 236 p. 786. [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] B. Beignier, ‘“De la langue perfide, deliver moi…”, Réflexions sur la loi du 13 juillet 1990 dite ‘loi Gayssot’, in Bruylant (ed), Pouvoir et Liberté, Etudes offertes à Jacques Mourgeon (1998), p. 525, cited from T. Hochmann, Le négationnisme face aux limites de la liberté d’expression, Editions A. Pedone, 2013, p. 644, note 284. [36] T. Hochmann, Le négationnisme face aux limites de la liberté d’expression (Editions A. Pedone 2013) p. 644. [37] Droin, 2019, p. 63, see above note 5. [38] Hochmann, 2013, p. 647, see above note 36. [39] See above note 22. [40] T. Hochmann, ‘Le Conseil constitutionnel et l’art de la suggestion. A propos du critère de la condamnation juridictionnelle du crime nié’, T. Hochmann, P. Kasparian (eds), L’extension du délit de négationnisme (2019), pp. 49-50. [41] ‘La loi sur le génocide arménien invalidée par le Conseil constitutionnel’, France 24 (28 February 2012) <https://www.france24.com/fr/20120228-france-turquie-armenie-genocide-loi-invalidee-censure-conseil-constitutionnel-diplomatie>. [42] ‘Diaspora arménienne en France’, Wikipedia <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_arménienne_en_France#:~:text=Ce%20sont%20essentiellement%20les%20immigrations,le%20génocide%20arménien%20de%201915> last accessed on 5 June 2024. [43] A. Dastakian, ‘Merci confrère – Un Conseil constitutionnel bien turcophile?’, Marianne (3 January 2015) <https://www.marianne.net/politique/un-conseil-constitutionnel-bien-turcophile>. [44] Proposition de résolution [Motion for a resolution], No.4996, 4 February 2022, accessible via the website of the Assmblée Nationale <https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b4996_proposition-resolution.pdf>.
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