At the RN, the stewards who thump to protect the leader

According to Le Monde, the weekend launching Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign, on 24 and 25 October in Orléans, was marked by the violent methods of the Département protection sécurité (DPS), the stewarding service of the Rassemblement national. The daily says it observed an internal strike group, named "Groupe action mobile 75", tasked with identifying and expelling any counter-protesters. That is all the dispatch gives us: we do not know the scale of the violence, the number of people targeted, or the party's response. The rest is our reading.

Let us start with what such an arrangement says about a rally. A political meeting is supposed to be a place where you persuade. Here, it looks more like a perimeter to be cleared. When a party hands a mobile team the job of spotting dissonant voices in order to remove them, it admits that its staging of popular fervour needs some rough handling. The crowd must be unanimous, and if it is not, it is made so.

This is where the contrast with mass movements becomes illuminating. Luxemburg saw in the mass strike a living school: workers learn by acting, in the fertile disorder of collective initiative, and organise themselves. The RN's stewarding service works the other way round. Here the base learns nothing; it is framed. The organisation does not grow from below; it is an instrument of control from above. Discipline serves not to carry anger towards emancipation, but to channel it towards a leader and to push aside whatever disturbs.

Then there is the question of the State, which this piece's angle obliges us to raise. A party that claims to embody public order and equips itself with its own agents of coercion makes a confession: it loves force, provided it is kept in hand. This pocket private police foreshadows a certain idea of power, in which legitimate violence is delegated to loyalists rather than submitted to common rules. We are not saying the RN would turn the State into a giant DPS; we are saying the question is fair to ask, as long as the party has not explained what it does with these methods.

One would be wrong, finally, to see only a matter of brutes in bomber jackets. Reformers who manage capitalism day to day readily let such forces flourish: they keep the discontented at arm's length and preserve the scenery. Against them, the only lasting answer is neither the indignation of the studio panel nor the polite appeal to institutions, but the organisation of those below, public, democratic, with no stewards to decide who gets to speak.

A meeting that must throw out its critics in order to look popular is like a party whose doors have been locked: you may call it joyful, but nobody will take your word for it.