It's ... complicated. France does have a concept of "liberté d'expression" (literally "freedom of speech"), but it isn't equivalent to the US 1st amendment.
That won't help you if you don't read french, but you can see here that while the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen" from 1789 has a concept somehow similar to "freedom of speech", a lot of exceptions have been created since then.
In practice you're correct that France doesn't have what US citizen mean by "freedom of speech". Though that becomes messy because the literal translation of the expression actually exists in the law, but with a different meaning.
That won't help you if you don't read french, but you can see here that while the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen" from 1789 has a concept somehow similar to "freedom of speech", a lot of exceptions have been created since then.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9_d%27expression#En...
In practice you're correct that France doesn't have what US citizen mean by "freedom of speech". Though that becomes messy because the literal translation of the expression actually exists in the law, but with a different meaning.