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.
Which means that freedom of speech is (in some cases) limited because of the religious freedom of others. It doesn't mean that freedom of speech doesn't exist, it means that the "balancing exercise" between certain Rights is performed differently.
Edit: There is no state in the world where there exists some sort of "absolute freedom of speech".
The "freedom of speech" discussed here is a legal concept, known as the 1st amendment of the US constitution. The common definition isn't really relevant. And it's true that France doesn't actually have such a thing guaranteed by the law. The closest you have is "liberté d'expression" which isn't as broad as "freedom of speech" in the US sense, and doesn't guarantee the same level of freedom.
It's not clear to me why "actual freedom of speech" should be equal to what is guaranteed by the US constitution. That would be like me saying "The US doesn't have the 'Right to Life'" because I'm exclusively applying the European definition of that term.
Freedom of expression/freedom of speech is guaranteed in some way in all Western nations, the difference – as you correctly point out – is the degree to which other rights are also taken into account when applying the Right to freedom of speech. But that's an extremely important distinction and it cannot be said that France doesn't have Freedom of speech.
