However, IMO, on the scale of authoritarianism, France does not still score very high - it's not like Turkey, not to mention Russia or Arab countries. But its advocating the right to be forgotten is another worrying sign here.
As far as authoritarianism goes, hopefully no-one would seriously claim that France or, say, the UK or US, is a similar living environment in practice to somewhere like various Arab states or Russia. However, it is still worrying that so many legal principles and government powers are being set up in disturbingly similar ways in the West lately, even if the current administrations are only using those powers in a small number of cases. There's definitely an element of the general population who aren't in certain demographic groups assuming that "it will never happen to me" and so condoning official powers or behaviour towards other people that they would never accept if they thought there was a significant chance that they or their own loved ones would be on the receiving end. I don't believe that is healthy for important issues like civil rights and government accountability.
As for the right to be forgotten itself, I personally have no problem with the basic principle that the CJEU seems to have established in the original case, and as it's an EU wide issue, I'm not sure how France's advocacy is any sort of threat to any cross-border provisions that come along with the EU. I don't see why France can or should be able to compel people in other jurisdictions to follow the same rules, absent some proper agreement with the other jurisdiction that those same rules will apply there, though.
Unfortunately, the logical conclusion if everyone sticks to their positions would be that the EU really might start trying to block traffic to and from sites hosted elsewhere that don't respect the same principles when it comes to issues like privacy. If you think about it, it's actually quite remarkable that the Internet has remained as open as it has for so long, but that same openness has also created a kind of lawlessness online that increasingly has negative and sometimes serious consequences in the real world, and sooner or later something has to give. Personally, I hope it won't come to anything as dramatic as a Great Firewall of Europe or the like, but it's a fine line that a large, international organisation like Google is being asked to walk here.
However, IMO, on the scale of authoritarianism, France does not still score very high - it's not like Turkey, not to mention Russia or Arab countries. But its advocating the right to be forgotten is another worrying sign here.