Abstract EN:

From the beginning of first world war until its end, french censorship had been asking for the removal of about 850 newspaper drawings. The outbreak of fighting led to the immediate application of preventive censorship by the authorities acting in common agreement with the journalists. But already after the first battles, the press reaffirmed its freedom of expression on political questions, while it continued to accept military and diplomatic informations being censured. About half of the removals requested by the censorship had been objected by the newspaper boards of directors. The existing laws permitted the government to confiscate papers. Their strict application would have led to at least 400 confiscations for the only reason that censured drawings had not been removed. Nevertheless during the whole wartime period this drastic measure was applied only to three papers that had not removed the censored drawings. Two other papers were threatened with serious sanctions, and another one was simply warned. The small number of severe sanctions taken against papers which did not remove censored press drawings suggests that freedom of press was maintained to a very large degree during the conflict, even if many papers suffered from the abuses and uncoherent application of censorship.