House arrest for wanting to protest: counter-terrorism turned against the street

According to franceinfo, legal experts and defenders of civil liberties accuse the Ministry of the Interior (the French home office) of diverting tools designed to fight terrorism in order to stop several dozen activists from taking part in the 24 and 31 October mobilisations. The house-arrest orders issued on that occasion are causing controversy. That is all the dispatch allows us to establish: we do not have here the exact number of people targeted, the grounds given in each case, or the ministry's response. The rest is our reading.

Yet a mechanism seems to be taking shape. A state of exception, voted in the name of an extraordinary threat, ends up serving the everyday business of public order. It no longer targets an act but a presence: people are not arrested for what they have done, they are sent home for what they might do by going out into the street. The right to protest becomes a revocable favour, granted to those the prefect deems respectable.

Marxists have a dry formula for this: the state is not a neutral arbiter. Its police, its courts and its regulations first protect a certain order of property. Later thinkers nuance the point: the state is also a terrain of struggle, and it enjoys a relative autonomy. Granted. But that autonomy has limits, and we measure them precisely when a social movement becomes inconvenient. Then the toolbox opens, and we discover that the instruments of exception were made for exactly this purpose.

There is also a lesson in strategy, and it concerns those who believe in safeguards. Rosa Luxemburg said it of reforms: what is wrested away, the ruling class takes back when its interests require it. Public freedoms are no exception to the rule. Those we thought secured by law turn out to rest on a balance of forces, and that balance is decided in the street, not in statements of disapproval. The jurists are right to denounce; they will not be enough.

For the purpose of these house-arrest orders, if it is confirmed, is to break what gives a movement its strength: the people who organise, meet and learn within it. A march is a school, where one learns by walking what no manual teaches. Isolating the most active militants means depriving the mobilisation of its educators without having to repress it head-on. The question now is whether anger can become lasting organisation, capable of absorbing these blows rather than dissolving under them.

A government that sends militants home in the name of the fight against terrorism reveals, without meaning to, what it fears: not bombs, but people who gather together. One does not put a crowd under house arrest; it always ends up finding the door.