France Promulgates the Loi sur la liberté de la presse du 29 juillet 1881

On July 29, 1881 the Frence government passed the Law on the Freedom of the Press 29 July 1881 (Loi sur la liberté de la presse du 29 juillet 1881), often called the Press Law of 1881 or the Lisbonne Law after its rapporteur, Eugène Lisbonne). This law defined the freedoms and responsibilities of publishers in France. It provided a legal framework for publications and regulated the display of advertisements on public roads. Often regarded as the fundamental legal statement on freedom of the press and freedom of speech in France, the law was inspired by Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789. While protecting freedom of the press, the law also imposed  legal obligations on publishers and criminalized certain  "press offences", particularly concerning defamation. With various amendments, the law remained in force in the early years of the 21st century.

"The passage of the law had an immediate effect, promoting a rapid expansion in the size and range of the French mass media. In 1882, 3,800 periodical publications were published in France; a decade later, aided by the freedoms granted in 1881, that figure had expanded to 6,000. The citizens of Paris found their choice of newspapers expanding from 23 in 1881 to 60 by 1899.^[10] By 1914, a total of 309 daily newspapers were being published in France, with four of those dailies - Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, Le Journal and Le Matin - selling a million copies every day.^[11]

"The liberalisation of the law of defamation had a less positive effect, enabling an upsurge in personal innuendo and vague allegations. The sociologist Gabriel Tarde commented that "Pornography and slander have become the life-blood of the newspaper." French readers were treated to a daily diet of rumour, speculation and character assassination presented as "echos" and "faits divers".^[3] The French press became increasingly dominated by sensationalist and even malicious reporting as it abused the freedoms granted by the 1881 law to "slander and incite to violence with almost total impunity." The writer Émile Zola personified the mixed benefits of the freedom granted by the law. It enabled him to publish his famous denunciation J'accuse in the newspaper L'Aurore in 1898, something that would have been forbidden 20 years previously, but the torrent of lurid newspaper accusations against the unjustly imprisoned Alfred Dreyfus led Zola to denounce the press as being

"a gutter press in heat, making its money out of pathological curiosity, perverting the masses ... higher up on the scale the popular newspapers, selling for a sou ... inspire atrocious passions ... [as well as] the higher so-called serious and honest press ... recording all with scrupulous care, whether it be true or false."^[12]

"The excessive liberalisation of the French press is held by some to have contributed to the "decadence" that crippled the Third Republic in the 1930s. Raymond Kuhn suggests that towards the end of the Third Republic in the late 1930s, abuses of the Press Law's freedoms "contribute[d] to the destabilisation of the political system when economic crisis and political scandal rocked the regime."^[2]

(Wikipedia article on Law on the Freedom of the Press of 29 July 1881, accessed 3-2021)