Banning the "great replacement": can the law silence what is being organised?

Según franceinfo, a bill has been tabled to make it illegal to invoke the "great replacement" theory. Its authors want thereby to "strengthen the fight against speech inciting hatred and racist and xenophobic acts". Public debate has revolved around this question since the racist attack in Trappes, in the Yvelines, which left one dead and seven injured.

The rest is our reading. The wire report is thin: we do not know who the signatories are, how the text defines "invocation", what penalties it provides for, or what the investigation has established about the attacker. We will therefore not pretend to judge a text we have not read. We can, however, ask the question that matters: who does a law aimed at an idea serve, and against whom does it act?

First, the instinct is understandable. Faced with a dead man, wounded people, and violence drawing on a narrative of hatred, demanding that the state respond is not indecent in the slightest. Those whom this theory brands as "invaders" live with it every day. Their anger is legitimate, and we will not lecture them.

But consider what this response presupposes. It treats racism as a vocabulary, something that could be extracted from debate by decree, when it is in fact a social force: networks, funding, complacent media, electoral calculations. Banning the formula risks seeing it change its name, like every idea pushed underground. And it entrusts the state apparatus, the very one with its own history in working-class neighbourhoods, with deciding what may be said and what must be silenced.

This is where the old lesson of Rosa Luxemburg keeps its edge. A measure, she said in substance, is judged by a test: does it increase the power and confidence of those below, or does it demobilise them? A law passed, whatever its virtue, can become a substitute: "something has been done", and one can go home. Yet what has pushed the far right back in history has rarely been statute alone. It has been trade unions, neighbourhood committees, tenants' collectives, strikes where people learn, side by side, that the enemy does not wear the face of the neighbour.

Democracy, she reminded us, is indispensable to workers: it is by exercising it that they become aware of their interests. Is a democracy where debate is increasingly framed by the criminal law more or less conducive to that learning? The question deserves better than a reflex, in either direction.

There is also the paradox of a Parliament discovering verbal firmness while inequality, bad housing, and the abandonment of public services in the suburbs deepen, all the soil in which scapegoats thrive. We ban the sentence and keep the scenery.

In Trappes, a man is dead. The best way not to forget him would be to tackle what arms hatred, not merely what names it. One can gag a slogan; one does not legislate fraternity.