Confined to home for protesting: the state is afraid of the street

According to Reporterre, environmental activists from Les Soulèvements de la terre (a radical environmental direct-action movement), the Faucheurs volontaires (volunteer crop-pullers who uproot GM crops) and the anti-bassine campaigns against irrigation reservoirs, who also took part in the social and student movement, have been placed under house arrest. They are linked to a terrorist threat, which strips them of the right to demonstrate. On Friday 30 October, at 6.30 p.m., Aldo, a retired schoolteacher aged 71, watched three gendarmes hand him an order from the Interior Ministry notifying him of "an administrative control measure". Those affected denounce an "authoritarian lurch" designed to "silence the revolt".

That is the facts as reported. What we still do not know: the exact number of people targeted, the specific evidence the administration relies on, and whether any appeals have been lodged. The rest is our reading.

It comes down to a simple question: what is left of a right to protest that an administrative order can suspend, without a judge, without a trial, on the strength of a "threat" the person has not even had the chance to contest? Emergency powers, we were solemnly assured, were meant for bombers. Now they are being used to keep a retiree who pulls up GM crops, or students who march, at arm's length. The tool changes hands, as it always does: the state of emergency has never liked staying in its drawer.

It would be wrong to see this as only a matter of individual liberties. What the order targets is the street as a place of collective learning. Mass movements often begin with a spark that looked tiny, and they educate those who take part faster than any party school could. Placing a few familiar faces under house arrest is an attempt to behead that school before the new term, to isolate the most active so that anger stays domestic, scattered, with nothing passed on.

Cautious reformers will tell us we need safeguards: an appeal to the administrative court (tribunal administratif), a better-drafted law. Very well, we will take the safeguards. But a concession won through mobilisation is taken back the moment order demands it; the protection of the right to protest will not live in the Journal officiel (the official gazette where French laws and decrees are published) if it does not first live in the marches. Confining oneself to pleading before judges is managing the retreat rather than halting it.

The real answer, then, is not one more petition but active solidarity: committees, unions, assemblies that refuse to sort protesters into the respectable and the suspect. A government that fears a 71-year-old schoolteacher this much reveals how shaky its certainties are. When the state confines people to their homes, it is because it has understood that the street, for now, still cannot be confined.