Right to protest: the LDH takes the Conseil d'Etat (France's top administrative court) to task over an authoritarian turn

According to Libération, the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, France's human rights league) and ten other organisations filed an emergency référé-liberté application with the Conseil d'Etat on Tuesday evening. They denounce "an unprecedented authoritarian turn": bans on protest routes and the mobilisation of the anti-terrorism apparatus, which, they say, infringe the right to demonstrate in France.

Restraint is required: at this stage, the dispatch does not tell us which demonstrations are targeted, which specific orders are involved, when the judge will rule, or how the government will respond. The référé-liberté is an urgent procedure, and we do not know its outcome. Everything that follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The reading comes down to one simple idea. In the Marxist tradition, the state is not a neutral arbiter: police, courts and regulations are shaped by property relations and protect them. Later Marxists add nuance: the state has a relative autonomy, it is also a terrain of struggle, and an appeal before the highest administrative court is proof of that. But its limits are set by the need to let capital accumulate. When the street becomes inconvenient, one soon discovers that the freedom to protest is a concession, and that a concession can be taken back.

This is where the case becomes instructive. Choosing a procession's route means deciding what it will be able to see, who it will be able to meet, what it will be able to block. A march pushed far from the centres of power becomes a stroll; a demonstration handled with anti-terrorism tools becomes a security problem rather than a political expression. The slide, if it is confirmed, is not first and foremost legal: it targets collective action itself, the means by which ordinary people learn to count themselves and act together.

We will not scorn the appeal. Hard-won reforms, and rights guaranteed by the judge, matter. But Rosa Luxemburg warns us against the illusion of treating them as a quiet accumulation: the real question is whether a measure strengthens the confidence and power of those at the bottom, or demobilises them. A victory before the Conseil d'Etat would be precious; it will not durably protect a right that nobody exercises any more.

The eleven organisations are doing what any society that cares about its liberties does: they appeal to the judge. We will wait to see what he answers. But a right to protest that survived only through rulings from the Palais-Royal (the Conseil d'Etat's seat in Paris) would be a right under a bell jar, and bells, as we know, are rung from underneath.