At the same time, the law imposes legal obligations on publishers and criminalises certain specific behaviours (called "press offences"), particularly concerning defamation.
[3] The free exercise of published speech was further limited by onerous requirements to obtain prior authorisation from the government and deposit a sum of "caution money".
The authorities were denied the power to suppress newspapers and the offence of délits d'opinion (crimes of opinion, or types of prohibited speech) was abolished.
This had previously enabled prosecutions of critics of the government, monarchy and church, or of those who argued for controversial ideas on property rights.
[4] One of the most important reforms instituted by the Press Law was a major reduction in the previously extensive range of activities deemed libelous.
[3] Any statement made in parliament, judicial tribunals or (by implication) administrative councils was exempted from punishment, thereby immunising public officials from liability for slandering colleagues.
[6] In recent years, French courts have repeatedly ruled that the law also applies to defamatory content communicated via the World Wide Web.
[8] The French parliament further amended the Press Law in 2004 to make it a crime to discriminate against or defame individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation.
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."
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 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.