On September 29, French President Emmanuel Macron stood before students at Madrid's Complutense University and explained what's wrong with America. The American idea of free speech, he said, is "the opposite of free speech."
He urged the European Union to enforce its Digital Services Act, the law that lets Brussels fine social media companies up to 6% of their global revenue for failing to police content, "much more extensively, much faster and much more forcefully." The EU had already used it to fine Elon Musk's X €120 million last December.
Three weeks later, France was on fire.
Protests that began in September over crumbling schools and the soaring cost of living turned into riots and looting across Paris and other French cities. Rioters burned the 19th-century town hall in Limoges. They chant anti-French sentiments while holding Palestinian flags. Police have arrested about 2,400 people, most of whom are not students, some of whom aren't even French.
Vice President JD Vance shared a video of the Limoges town hall in flames. "Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion," he wrote, adding that they ignored basic questions of assimilation and compatibility. Then he warned Americans: this is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.
President Trump blamed "the immigration of people from an entirely different world" and told Macron: "Close your borders and take control before it is too late!"
Macron's answer came from Qatar.
On October 21, at the end of a Gulf tour to buy diesel for a country short on fuel, Macron called comments by foreign leaders "as unacceptable as they are stupid." Asked whether he meant Trump, he said: "Among others."
He accused foreign leaders of "foreign manipulation of information" and of "sometimes naively repeating AI-generated content." He said people were spreading claims that France had been "invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists," which he called "completely false." And he suggested that people "speaking ill of our country" don't love it.
He didn't say which AI images he meant, or how he knew they were fake. He named no evidence, only a verdict: the Americans were wrong, and it was stupid of them to believe what they were seeing with their own eyes.
That's the European idea of speech Macron was selling in Madrid. Speech is free as long as it stays inside what he called a "common framework." The government decides what counts as misinformation, regulators fine the platforms that let it spread, and a president who disagrees with your analysis of his country's riots calls it manipulation.
Macron has also pressed Trump to lift U.S. visa bans on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner who championed the Digital Services Act. The Trump administration has told American diplomats to oppose the law because it threatens Americans' free speech.
Meanwhile, back home, Macron's government is preparing for this weekend. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised a security deployment that will be "massive," after admitting the response to the last round of riots was too slow and too static. The government plans to deploy about 80,000 security personnel, nearly as many as at the peak of the 2018 yellow vest riots. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez is calling in the RAID, GIGN, and BRI elite police units, helicopters, water cannon, and Centaure armored vehicles. Soldiers from Operation Sentinelle, France's anti-terror force, will guard key sites so police can go after the rioters.
Nuñez is also studying a ban on unauthorized demonstrations.
None of that is the work of a man confident that everything in France is fine. It's what a government does when it has lost control of its streets, and Macron spent the week arguing over what Americans were allowed to say about it.
In America, the President and the Vice President can look at France and say what they see. In Macron's France, they'd be accused of spreading misinformation.
He called American free speech "the opposite of free speech" in September. In October, Americans used it to describe his burning cities, and he called them stupid.