Under house arrest before the march: counter-terrorism serving public order

According to franceinfo, activists were prevented from marching on Saturday 31 October: placed under house arrest in the name of counter-terrorism, they stayed at home while others marched. France Télévisions met several of them, including a farmer, who describes a mechanism of labelling: "Little by little, they stick a kind of label on you." The question the channel poses is simple: how far can violence be prevented without restricting the right to demonstrate?

What we do not yet know, for lack of detail in the dispatch: on what specific grounds these measures rest, who signed them, what appeals were attempted, how many people are affected. These answers matter, and we await them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Even in its current state, the mechanism is glaring. A preventive house arrest does not punish an act: it anticipates a presumed intention. The citizen is no longer judged for what he did but for what he might do, and the burden of proving otherwise falls on him, a curious way of reversing the burden of proof. A farmer finds himself caught in tools designed against terrorist attacks: a shift of vocabulary that should make us raise an eyebrow, then both.

One can read this through an old Marxist idea, nuanced by its heirs: the state is not a neutral referee; its police, courts and procedures first protect an order of property, even if it remains a terrain of struggle where rights are won and lost. When a social movement becomes inconvenient, the exceptional arsenal, voted for another threat, finds other uses. Exceptions have this habit: they never go back into the cupboard alone.

We must be honest about the other side. Preventing violence is not illegitimate in itself, and no serious person demands a procession without any rules. But a democracy is judged by what it tolerates of its own disturbance. A march is not a public order incident; it is one of the schools where ordinary people learn to organise, to debate, to discover a collective strength. Depriving of this school those suspected of learning there too fast is settling the debate before it has taken place.

And the effect goes beyond those targeted. Each house arrest sends a message to neighbours, colleagues, union members: stay cautious, you too could be labelled. Fear works better than the baton; it leaves no images. This is why the answer cannot rest only on the administrative courts, useful but slow: it requires the movement itself to make these house arrests a collective, public affair, debated in the squares as much as in the courtrooms.

A power that places under house arrest those who wanted to march ends up teaching an involuntary lesson: that the street, it seems, frightens it more than the terrorism it invokes.