What if the state of the French police is but a reflection of the profound malaise engulfing the rule of law in the country as a whole? Just over a month after the death of Nahel Merzouk, a seventeen-year-old boy shot down by the police, France now confronts seditious inclinations within its law enforcement ranks.

The increasing prevalence of protests across France in recent years has emboldened the country’s police. This is because their ability to ensure law and order is the basis on which parties from the center and Right have sought to legitimize themselves to the conservative sections of the electorate. French police have thus felt able to assert themselves, rebel, and seek to operate outside the boundaries of the law.

On July 24, the director-general of the National Police (DGPN) stated publicly that he opposed the idea of placing a police officer in pretrial detention — a stance endorsed by the prefect of police in Paris and validated by the Ministry of the Interior itself, which found no fault in the DGPN’s remarks. Within the French political landscape, the right wing rejoices at the country’s drift toward authoritarianism: Senator Valérie Boyer of Les Républicains believes that prisons should be reserved for those who pose a threat to society, thus concluding that the guardians of law cannot, by definition, be arrested for misconduct. Meanwhile, some officers resort to sick leave as a form of protest and have even organized demonstrations outside the home of a judge who ordered pretrial detention for one of their colleagues. How did it come to this?