Is it illegal to name a pig "Napoleon" in France? No, that's not true: There was never a law in France that dictated how to name a pig. An 18th-century law punished slandering the French president but it was scrapped in 2013.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok by @sintrust0 on April 13, 2023. It opened with a clip of a baby pig trotting out under the caption (translated from Korean into English by Lead Stories staff):
In France, you have to follow the law when naming a pig.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 18:37:30 2023 UTC)
The video, which presents a series of unique laws in various countries, claims it is illegal to name a pig Napoleon "because the name Napoleon represents the dictator Stalin." The Stalin reference comes from George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm," in which a despotic pig modeled after Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union is named after the Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, who ruled France from 1799 to 1814.
The purported law that allegedly prohibits naming a pig Napoleon has often been featured in listicles that reel off the world's most bizarre laws. It is, however, false. A 1881 decree made it a punishable offense to insult the French president, but there is no particular mention of naming a pig Napoleon.
The decree was abolished in 2013 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in March 2013 that France had infringed upon a protester's right to freedom of expression by fining him for holding up a banner that read, "Get lost, asshole" ("Casse-toi, pauvre con," in French)" to then-President Nicholas Sarkozy.
