Right to Read for French Secondary Students

Background

While censorship has been present for centuries in France (Martin, 2022), the establishment of a strong centralized power has given the nation a long tradition of censorship, marked by the fate of some masterpieces: The Encyclopédie, censored in 1752, Les Fleurs du mal (1857) censored until 1949, and J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), attacked in court for contempt of public morals (Delbrassine, 2018).

With the advent of the 1949 law on publications intended for young people, books for youth became regulated at the national level (Légifrance, 2021). In that respect, publications for young people are governed by a legal framework that included the establishment of a Commission for the Monitoring and Control of Publications, which is intended for children and teenagers and dependent on the Ministry of Justice (Légifrance, 2021). By this means, the French State establishes official censorship, arguing that it is a matter of targeting “publications intended for young people.” However, the scope of the law’s application is immediately broadened by its article 14, which allows the Ministry of the Interior to sanction “publications of any nature presenting a danger to young people” and the text is therefore used to target erotic and pornographic publications (Delbrassine, 2018). As this commission meets four times a year to examine titles from the annual French editorial productions, we can notice that it is rare for the commission to decide on the withdrawal of the work studied, which is editorial work being carried out prior to publication.