In the era of anti-“wokisme,” it’s been easy to forget what French republicanism really stands for. A short history of the Human Rights League (LDH) is a good reminder. One of France’s oldest rights advocacy groups, the LDH was founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, joining the network of forces that defended the Jewish officer (falsely convicted of treason) and blocked a protofascist right from drowning the country’s fledgling democracy. Barring a milquetoast critique of colonialism, the LDH has been a consistent watchdog on state and social violence since then, defending everything from a liberal interpretation of secularism to freedom of expression and the right of workers to strike and organize. Unsurprisingly, the organization was banned during the grimmest years of France’s twentieth century: the Vichy regime.

The recent wave of attacks against the LDH is therefore an all-too-telling sign of just where Emmanuel Macron’s government is taking France. Leading an effort to muzzle civil society, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, questioned the public subsidies granted to the LDH, suggesting during a round of hearings on French policing in early April that the group had abused its status as an observer at protest marches.

“There’s not a problem with the police, there’s a problem with the ultraleft,” the interior minister said, dismissing the documentation produced by groups like the LDH of the aggressive use of police force at an environmentalist protest in Sainte-Soline in western France or against demonstrators opposed to the government’s retirement reform. Instead of reining in her subordinate, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne doubled down on Darmanin’s attacks, saying before the Senate a week later that she “no longer understood” many of the LDH’s positions and that its stance on secularism reflected softness on “radical Islamism.”