Confined to Marseille for not protesting: the state bans first, before the street gets a say

According to franceinfo, several dozen people were barred from demonstrating last weekend, under orders issued by the Ministry of the Interior. One of them, a teacher in Marseille, agreed to speak out. His sentence, picked up by the site's headline, says it all: "I was not allowed to leave Marseille." House arrest, then, to stop him reaching a demonstration.

What we do not know, from the wire report alone, is considerable: which demonstration exactly, on what written grounds the orders rest, what appeals have been attempted, and how many people are actually affected beyond "several dozen". We will therefore attribute to the ministry no intention that its text does not state. What is established is enough to raise the question: an administration can now pin someone to their city before they have taken a single step in a procession.

Here is our reading. Preventive prohibition reverses the logic of a right. To demonstrate is ordinarily to face sanction afterwards, before a judge, on the basis of facts. Here, punishment comes upstream, on the strength of an executive's assessment. The teacher is not an actor in this scene; he is its subject: no one reproaches him for what he has done, they fear what he might do.

The Marxist tradition reminds us that the state is not a neutral referee: police, courts and regulations first protect an order of property. More recent Marxists qualify this, holding that the state enjoys relative autonomy and remains a site of struggle. This episode offers a discreet illustration: when social contestation gains strength, coercion stops hiding behind consent and takes out its letterheaded papers. No truncheon here, only an order, neater, quieter, almost polite.

Yet democracy, Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Reform or Revolution, is "indispensable" to the working class, because it is in exercising its rights that it becomes conscious of its interests (our translation). Depriving someone of the street means taking away that school. The demonstration is not tolerable folklore: it is the place where one learns to act together, where one discovers that one is not alone in thinking what one thinks.

Cautious reformers will tell us these measures are exceptional, supervised, temporary. Perhaps. But what is exceptional one weekend becomes the case law of fear the next. A democratic conquest that is not defended in the street ends up as a concession taken back by post.

We will see what the judges say, and above all what the colleagues, the pupils and the unions of this teacher will do. For house arrest may well keep a man in Marseille, but it has never managed to keep an idea within a perimeter.