Whatever Happened to France’s Famed ‘Liberté’?

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/opinion/whatever-happened-to-frances-famed-liberte.html

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PARIS — Shortly before midnight on Nov. 13, 2015, in an address intended to project an air of solemn strength but which nonetheless betrayed the bewilderment that now seems to permeate French public life, President François Hollande offered to the nation what little information he possessed about the atrocities then underway in Paris. “There are dozens killed, there are many injured,” Mr. Hollande said. “It is a horror.”

In the confusion of early morning, as the full scale of the killings became apparent — 413 wounded, 130 dead, the deadliest attack on civilians on French soil since World War II — the president declared a state of emergency, freeing the country’s security services from many of the legal constraints, and much of the judicial oversight, to which they must submit in normal times. Initially expected to last only a short time, the state of emergency has now been in place for more than 16 months. It is scheduled to continue through at least midsummer. Under its provisions, the police have conducted more than 4,000 warrantless searches and raids, placed more than 700 people under administrative house arrest (some for more than a year), and closed around two dozen mosques and Muslim prayer spaces.

This spectacle of state power may have reassured many people here, but there is little to suggest that it has made their country safer in ways that normal law could not. The scores of searches without warrants, for instance, have resulted in only about 20 indictments on terrorism charges; over the same period, more than 150 terrorism indictments have been obtained without recourse to such tactics. The security services have headed off a number of apparently imminent attacks in recent months, but these successes seem to have owed nothing to the state of emergency. Its provisions have also failed to prevent several episodes of mass violence, including a truck rampage in Nice last summer that killed 86 and wounded scores more.

In December, a parliamentary commission found that what quantifiable utility the state of emergency may have had in its first days — allowing the intelligence services, for instance, to quickly confirm or assuage concerns about certain individuals, and thus to focus their resources more efficiently — has long since evaporated. The state of emergency, the commission noted, has furthermore upended the lives of thousands of French citizens and residents — a small number with hostile intentions toward their country, it is true, but the great majority with only the misfortune to have aroused the suspicions or enmities of the security services.

None of this has provoked an outcry, or any visible transformation of society. On the contrary, most French citizens find the state of emergency to be entirely innocuous, if it is perceptible to them at all. They carry on with the expectation that they themselves do not have anything to fear from it and, for some, the conviction that those who do were likely undeserving of the protections they formerly enjoyed. (Polling has suggested both that a marked majority of the French approve of the state of emergency and, paradoxically, that a majority also believe it ineffective.)

In about a month, France will elect a new president, who will inherit the powers of the emergency state. The prospect that Marine Le Pen, the vituperative populist, might soon be wielding them against whom she pleases — “globalist” elites, say, or devout Muslims, or immigrants, or the various other groups she has identified as threatening the nation’s integrity — does not seem to worry anyone.

Perhaps this is to do with a certain disaffection within the electorate. But her opponents have not sought to make the state of emergency a campaign issue, either. Only one of her principal rivals, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far left, has called plainly in his platform for its end. A recent television debate by the top candidates, despite running more than three hours, included not a single mention of it.

One merit of the state of emergency, then, has been to demonstrate once again the power of normalization, the inertial drift by which democratic principles and protections are abandoned, and to confirm that electoral politics cannot be relied upon to check it.

The ease with which the normalization has proceeded in France surely has much to do with the comforts of modern, democratic life, and the tendency to retreat into them. One has little need of rights in one’s cocoon. Comforts aside, the French mood is one of grievance. Justifiably, many French feel themselves the victims of economic stagnation, of cultural decline, of a blinkered and self-satisfied ruling class. It is perhaps naïve to hope that those invested in their own sense of hardship might summon the moral energy to consider, let alone protest, the woes of others.

French political culture, run through with a deep messianic strain, also abets this normalization. In France’s mythology, the “République” — a word the French use to signify not so much their form of government as a vague but sacred revolutionary ideal — does not know error. Sometimes the République stands for “liberté,” sometimes “égalité,” sometimes “fraternité,” sometimes none of these at all; it is always right, though, and it is unfailingly invoked to justify whatever the values or policies of the moment happen to be. The state of emergency can only be just, by this patriotic illogic: The République decreed it.

That its excesses seem to land overwhelmingly upon a mistrusted Muslim minority has also surely helped. The state of emergency has served to affirm the notion that this minority indeed deserves suspicion, and has additionally suggested that suspicion is the functional equivalent of guilt. These are dangerous insinuations, particularly in France, where the populace has long looked to its powerful state not only as legal authority, the mediator of relations between individuals, but as moral guide and provider. Liberal democrats will hope the French, in their present discontent, are ignoring the lessons the République is dispensing. (Others are evidently listening. Upon declaring its own state of emergency in July, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said his country was merely doing “just like France has done.”)

Among French Muslims, the state of emergency is widely understood as further evidence of their country’s hostility toward them and their faith; many claim it will drive more of their community into the arms of extremists. That seems a bit pat, but certainly the state of emergency isn’t winning them over to the country’s secular, patriotic creed.

Many French people will be untroubled by this. They will rightly remark that the men and women affected by the state of emergency are, in some proportion, unsavory, disreputable, discomfiting: drug dealers and petty crooks; men with heavy beards and bearings of menace; their wives swathed in black.

The emergency of this confused moment is to recall that this observation ought to be entirely irrelevant; that the République the French profess to defend would afford these citizens, however distressing or strange, precisely the same protections as the rest; and that this fair-minded liberality has long been the better part of their country’s grandeur.