French police arrest nearly 1,800 amid nationwide protests and clashes
France’s Streets Are Not a State of Nature
Peaceful protest in France is a rightful check on power, but looting, arson, and unreviewed force from the magistrate alike stray from the law of nature that gives any government its title to obedience.
I begin not with abstract maxims, but with the broken glass and burnt-out cars on France’s streets. We are told that hundreds of thousands assembled in nationwide demonstrations; that nearly 1,800 persons were arrested, almost half in Paris; that more than 500 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters were injured; that around 1,500 shops and retailers were damaged, some looted, some burned. We are further told that the Interior Minister himself acknowledges demonstrating to be a “fundamental right,” even while he speaks of “outrages” by several thousand determined to confront the police and attack public buildings. Here are, in short, a people expressing grievances, and amidst them others treating civil society as spoil.
When I sought, in the Second Treatise of Government, to understand political power aright, I began from a state of nature where men are free and equal under the law of nature, bound not to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. That same rule judges both magistrate and multitude. To assemble peaceably and speak one’s discontent is no rebellion, but an exercise of natural liberty and a means to preserve property in the broad sense: lives, liberties, and estates. But to smash a neighbour’s windows, to burn his shop, to loot his goods, is to set oneself against that law, and so to forfeit the protection one claims.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish carefully. First, there are hundreds of thousands who gather to petition, whose conduct, so far as appears, does not exceed their right. Secondly, there are those “violent groups” who clash with officers and plunder shops. Thirdly, there is the public force, which may act within its commission or slide, almost unawares, into arbitrary power. All three stand under the same measure: no one ought to harm another, and no one should be a judge in his own case. When the crowd punishes imagined injustice by private violence, it makes itself judge. When the magistrate meets disorder with unbounded discretion, he does the same.
The French authorities report at least 1,800 arrests and more than 500 public officers injured. They also report that their own inspectorate has opened 36 investigations into alleged police violence since high-school protests began. These figures tell me two things. First, force has been used on a large scale, by both sides, in thick confusion. Secondly, there is at least some acknowledgment that the sword of the commonwealth must itself be held to account, that an impartial judge is needed even where uniforms are worn. This is promising, but the mere opening of inquiries does not yet show whether abuses are punished or silently excused.
In every settled commonwealth there must be a power to restrain those who break the peace. No government is bound to stand idle while a restaurant is wrecked, a tourist office burned, or a baker sees his livelihood reduced to shards. To act against such assaults on property is not tyranny but the very end for which political society was formed. Yet there is a constant temptation, especially where the magistrate fears disorder, to stretch this necessary power into prerogative: measures “reserved for much more serious situations” become routine, crowds are treated en masse, and each citizen is taught to expect not a known standing law, but the variable temper of armed men in the streets.
Prerogative, as I argued, is a power to act for the public good where the law is silent or too slow; it is tolerated only while it manifestly serves that good and remains revocable. If the policing of these French protests is proportioned, guided by clear law, and subject to real censure when officers overstep, then it stays within the trust originally reposed in government. If, on the contrary, harsh tactics become systematic, if detentions are indiscriminate, if 36 investigations die quietly in a file, then a free people may justly ask whether their protectors have begun a “long train of abuses” that dissolves that trust. Fear of broken windows is no warrant for chaining a nation.
Yet those who suffer from misrule, or believe they do, must remember that revolution is an appeal to heaven, not a fit of passion. When I wrote that the dissolution of government is not the dissolution of society, I did not thereby license every angry faction to try its strength in the street. The first duty, on both sides, is obedience to the law of nature: to seek redress by petition, by argument, by lawful pressure, and to reserve force for the extremity where usurpation is plain and all peaceful remedies are shut. France’s present unrest looks less like that extremity, and more like a grave warning: consent is strained, but not yet irretrievable, if rulers and ruled will heed it.
If I err, it is in not yet knowing whether the force used by France’s magistrates is truly proportioned and accountable, or whether, under the fair name of order, it is hardening into something arbitrary and so dissolving the very trust that first armed it.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The dissolution of a government is not the dissolution of society: a people can replace a broken legislative without descending into chaos. Fear of disorder is therefore no argument for enduring tyranny — but revolution answers only to 'a long train of abuses' tending the same way, not to every private grievance.
- A Letter Concerning Toleration — The commonwealth exists only for civil interests — life, liberty, health, and possessions; the care of souls is not, and cannot be, the magistrate's business.