Unlike the US France has a number of restrictions on free speech with respect to defamation on any grounds, this also includes privacy laws. These are probably the most restrictive in Europe.
France has some of the toughest hate speech laws in the EU. The number of legal actions for hate speech have multiplied after the 1881 Law on Press Freedom was amended to introduce the offence of inciting racial hatred, discrimination, violence, or contesting the existence of crimes against humanity, which has been very broadly interpreted as the right not to be offended or criticised. Some civil society groups have even managed to force the cancellation of public debates in order to prevent potentially libellous or racist remarks
These have been extended to online discourse.
The French Press Freedom Law of 1881 – which guarantees freedom of expression for the press – has been amended so that it applies to online publication. It aims to extend the protections for press freedom online but also allows people to take legal action for libellous or hate speech online, including on blogs posts, tweets and Facebook comments. In October 2012, a French court ruled that Twitter should provide the identities of users who tweeted jokes deemed to be offensive to Muslims and Jews. This was after the Union of French Jewish Students threatened to bring the social media giant to court. During the course of the case, French Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira said that it is a punishable offence to make racist or anti-Semitic comments online. There is pressure to reframe the 1881 Law on Press Freedom, which many consider “no longer adapted to new technologies”.
The solution to disagreement whether hate speech [in all its forms] is one for the Courts to decide, not armed and murderous thugs.
To put things in perspective Charlie Hebdo had a circulation of around fifty thousand per week in a population of sixty million.
The "Je Suis Charlie Hebdo" is not necessarily a support of what they did themselves, but the principle of a "free" press as a whole. They annoyed a great many people over the years. I will mock all the groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center deem to be hate groups, some may argue that they be shut down, it depends on your view just how free "free" speech should be.
I believe focusing on what Charlie Hebdo actually did is irrelevant whether you liked or disliked their work, whether you were offended or not.
Satire in France helped fire up the Revolution, Horatian satire [the jolly happy satire] is not the French culture, it's of the more brutal Juvenal school of satire.
More interesting in their wealth of symbols than even the speeches and writings of the time are the pictorial satires and allegories, great numbers of which have been preserved. They are documents of real historical importance and have hitherto been much neglected. They reveal the spirit of the time as no mere printed words could ever do. They are products of this special revolution, for nothing like them had ever been known before. They filled a real need, for they appealed even to the illiterate; and three fourths of the population of France at that time could neither read nor write. They show us the Revolution as it was shown to the common man of the period.
If the argument is reduced to whether "I'm with" or "I'm not with" Charlie Hebdo then the whole point has been missed and we enter a whole new discussion entirely. What do find acceptable and what you don't and people have very different views as to what is and is not forbidden to do.
17 people have been brutally killed by murderous thugs.
This was over some cartoons seen by a pretty limited audience initially, the end result is that they will be seen by millions more.
You have to go a long into insanity way to deem this a capital offense.
What we are standing for is a principle and not the specificity of what was expressed.
I will be demonstrating for the principle and not necessarily for the ideas and would encourage many others to do the same.
I find the argument of being with, or not, as being totally irrelevant at this time.
Freedom of speech has always had its dangers, how different cultures deal with that is up to them. If I was to say that the US should adopt the French laws on hate speech and privacy many in the US would be shocked, I have often found the French laws as an American Expat to be overly restrictive.
So I'll be standing up for the right of free speech and the right not to be slaughtered for exercising that right.