Counter-terrorism against protesters: the state of emergency never really went away

According to Le Monde, lawyers denounce the use of "individual administrative control and surveillance measures", the Micas, to stop activists from demonstrating. This arrangement, a legacy of the state of emergency of 2015-2017, allows freedom of movement to be restricted in the name of counter-terrorism. According to the daily, dozens of people have been subject to them in recent weeks, on the fringes of the social movement. We do not know at this stage the details of the cases, the grounds cited or the judicial follow-up: the dispatch says no more. The rest is our reading.

We were promised a parenthesis. The state of emergency was meant to be that exceptional patch, applied on a night of mourning and removed as soon as the storm had passed. Instead the parenthesis has made its nest in ordinary law, and here it is again, more discreet, more administrative, more polite. No tanks in the street: an order, a sign-in, a perimeter. The prefect replaces the gendarme, and paperwork replaces the truncheon. It is cleaner, and that is precisely the problem.

For the tool changes target without changing name. Designed for terrorist threats, it serves, according to the lawyers cited by Le Monde, to keep people away from demonstrations. Let no one tell us this is a technical detail. An exceptional measure that finds a new use ceases to be exceptional: it becomes a reflex. The repressive apparatus is never dismantled; it is stored in a drawer until the next opportunity.

And the opportunity is well chosen. Luxemburg wrote that the mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great struggle of the proletariat, and for this the workers must gather en masse, leave the factory and the workshop, and overcome the atomisation that capitalism imposes on them daily (our translation, Grève de masse, parti et syndicats). This is what an individual ban on movement strikes: not a riot, but the moment when isolated people become a number. You do not stop anger; you stop it from meeting itself.

It is also a matter of apprenticeship. A social movement is a school: one learns to organise by doing it, to coordinate, to hold on. Taking activists' place in the procession away from them is like shutting classrooms in the middle of a lesson, and marking the most active as suspects from within. The message to the others is crystal clear: stay at home, or be logged among those who are watched.

The reformists, for their part, will tell us these arrangements are framed, supervised by a judge, proportionate. Perhaps. But a democratic conquest that the state takes back whenever social order demands it was never a conquest: it was a loan. The right to demonstrate exists so long as it disturbs no one, and we discover it can be revoked by simple letter.

The lawyers are right to sound the alarm, and the courts will have to rule on the law. But the freedom to assemble will not be defended only in the courtrooms: it is defended in the street, exactly where they are trying to stop you from going. The state of emergency is not over: it has simply learned to strike before the first step of the procession.