In recent years, France has seen a flurry of measures reinforcing police powers at the expense of civil liberties. Key in this regard have been laws originally designed to confront petty criminality or terrorism, as after the 2015 Bataclan attacks, but then normalized and systematically used to repress protests.

It was in this vein that France’s “sanitary state of emergency,” introduced in March 2020, made policing a cornerstone of public-health policy at the very moment that Emmanuel Macron’s government was introducing authoritarian measures like the “global security law.” While the Constitutional Council has censured some of this legislation’s most controversial elements, it is still squarely aimed at shielding police from scrutiny by protestors, journalists, and civilians.

Raphaël Kempf is a criminal defense attorney in Paris. In his work, he has defended protestors, activists, and individuals charged with “apology for terrorism,” and he is currently representing one of the defendants in the trial surrounding the 2015 Paris attacks. A champion of civil liberties, Kempf is also author of Enemies of the State, a book that turns back to an earlier period of encroaching authoritarianism — the anti-anarchist laws of the 1890s — and points to its connections to the present.