The true from the false. What do you risk by being shirtless in public, whether you are a man or a woman?

It’s a question that we sometimes ask ourselves during the heat of summer: is it true that we risk a fine when we walk shirtless in a public place? In theory, this is false, since the law no longer prohibits topless. The offense of “indecent exposure” no longer exists in the Penal Code since 1994. But beware, because there are several exceptions.

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Town halls can prohibit it under certain conditions

Town halls can prohibit topless. This is the case in many coastal towns. For example in Ouistreham, in Calvados, topless is prohibited outside the beaches from June to September. The municipality explains in its decree that this can “altering public hygiene and sanitation”. Another reason: Ouistreham is a place of remembrance of the 1944 landings and the town wishes to develop tourism “with respect for veterans”, with therefore an outfit deemed decent. To ban the topless, the town halls must therefore justify local circumstances and the ban must be limited in time and space.

Some decrees have, in fact, already been challenged. In 2007, the municipality of La Grande-Motte had banned bathing suits and topless in the city. But after the appeal of one of the offenders, the administrative court of Montpellier challenged this order. He estimated “that these outfits did not present serious material problems, and that the sole alleged immoral nature of the said outfits (…) could not justify their prohibition.” Since then, La Grande-Motte has taken another decree, this time invoking the family clientele of the seaside resort.

Does the law distinguish between shirtless men and women?

For women, it’s even more complicated. There is a legal debate whether bare breasts have a sexual character or not, because the Penal Code, in its article on sexual exhibition, does not specify it. The question arose with the actions of the Femen, these activists who write political messages on their bare chests. They are sometimes tried for sexual exhibition. But they are not always doomed in the end.

One of them had written “Kill Putin” (“Kill Poutine”) on her chest, and had damaged the statue of Vladimir Poutine at the Grévin museum in Paris in 2014. She was acquitted by the Paris Court of Appeal in 2017, which then considered that the offense of sexual exhibition was not constituted, since “the intention expressed by its author is devoid of any sexual connotation”. In 2020, the Court of Cassation, seized, had on the contrary judged that there was indeed an offense of sexual exhibition, while confirming the release, because the conviction of the Femen would have presented “a disproportionate interference in the exercise of freedom of expression”.

A little earlier, in 2019 in another of its judgments, the Court of Cassation rejected an appeal filed by another Femen, who had been sentenced to a month’s suspended prison sentence. She had demonstrated topless in a Parisian church outside of office hours, to denounce the Church’s position on the right to abortion. The case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights, which in October 2022 finally condemned the decision of the French justice, considering that freedom of expression should take precedence over the offense of sexual exhibition. Justice therefore had to pay 10,000 euros to the Femen in question.

Finally, more generally, for women, everything depends on the context. At the beach, for example, it is tolerated. Three years ago, gendarmes in Pyrénées-Orientales asked two topless women on the beach to cover their chests. But the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin had publicly disavowed them, considering that their intervention was “unfounded”.