House arrest orders: counter-terrorism law is now being used to keep protesters at home

According to Mediapart, the Interior Ministry is issuing house-arrest orders (arrêtés d'assignation à résidence), based on counter-terrorism provisions, against protesters. Some of these activists have no criminal record. Tested on 24 October, the method appears to have become widespread a week later, according to the investigative site. We do not, at this stage, have the exact number of people targeted, the specific grounds cited in each order, or the appeals filed. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with the banality of the affair, which is its most troubling feature. A tool designed for exceptional situations, presented at the time as exceptional, is being used to deal with an ordinary public-order problem: people who demonstrate. You try it first on a few people, on a Saturday. Eight days later, it is administrative routine. This is not a slip, it is the normal functioning of a toolbox: what exists eventually gets used.

One can see here, with the Marxists, what the state does when it is inconvenienced. The police, the courts and the statutes are not neutral referees: they first protect the established order, that of property and accumulation. Post-war Marxists add nuance: the state has a relative autonomy, and it is also a terrain of struggle. But its limits are set by the need to let capital keep turning. When dissent touches that need, the heavy kit is quickly brought out. Placing under house arrest someone who has never been convicted means taking away their right to be in the street on the day the street matters.

And who are these people? Not figures from a noir novel. Activists, perhaps trade unionists, neighbours who give up a Saturday from their free time, squeezed between work, the shopping and the children's homework. Let us be concrete: a house-arrest order, with a requirement to sign in at the police station, is a broken timetable. Who looks after the children during the sign-in? Who explains to the employer why one is late because one has to sign at the police station? The burden falls on the household, as always: on those who keep the home standing, often women, already doing the double shift. Repression also has a domestic dimension.

The intended effect, moreover, is not only individual. The order targets the person named, but it speaks to everyone else: stay at home, next time it could be you. There is no need to convict en masse when the fear of the procedure does the work. Ordinary political participation, that of people with neither a corporate lawyer nor time to waste, becomes a risk that only the most available or the most stubborn will accept.

There remain questions the government owes the public: on what evidence do these orders rest, who supervises them, and how long will the exception remain exceptional? In the meantime, one thing is clear: when counter-terrorism is used to manage marches, the right to protest is being treated as a threat.