‘Maintaining order’: State terror against the people in France (CTS Blog Series #1)
“It is in their blood, it’s in their DNA, they are programmed to kick off …”. Protest may be a French thing. The cliché is not entirely wrong: taking to the streets is part of how we do politics. Every new mobilisation brings its wave of memes about the French and their love of taking to the streets, blockades, etc. But so is the violence protesters meet, and that part gets far less attention. France has been dominating the headlines since the general strike of 17 October 2026. What started with high school students mobilising at the lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint Denis, in the Parisian suburbs, on 29 September 2026, quickly spread across the entire territory, both metropolitan France and the overseas territories (Guadeloupe, Mayotte). This post is not about what some portray as “riots and chaos”. It focuses instead on state violence and terror against its own citizens: how counterterrorism has allowed and enabled the state to be more violent, and what this looks like in October 2026. What I want to look at here is not why people are protesting, but how the state is answering them: with counterterrorism techniques, powers, strategies and narratives, all packaged under the guise of le maintien de l’ordre (maintaining order).
One question that has been floating around over the last few days given the scale of the police response: why hasn't a state of emergency been declared? The answer is simple: the Government doesn’t need to. Since 2017, a large chunk of the emergency powers has been incorporated into ordinary law via the SILT bill. In October 2026, the executive, and the police forces by extension, already have the power they need to crush dissent without triggering any formal exception.
Scholars who have spent years researching these movements and state techniques remain largely unheard in public debate. Critical Terrorism Studies can change that, because it names this violence for what it is: state terror. Counterterrorism is not confined to the battlefield nor the immediate aftermath of an attack; it shapes everyday life and increasingly criminalises protest. What we see in France right now goes further: strict counterterrorism powers, the repertoire of the state of exception and a militarised, colonial approach to policing, all coming together. What binds them is the logic of counterterrorism itself. It is preventive (a ban on future protests was announced on the 22nd of October by the President himself), and it is organised around the figure of the 'enemy within'. When Macron asks “Comment des français ont-ils pu faire ça à la France?” (How could French people have done this to France?), he says exactly that: the protesters are placed outside the nation, as if they were attacking it from the inside, constructing them as the enemy. Counterterrorism has never only been about terrorism. It has always also been an instrument to repress dissident voices.
A colonial continuum
Behind the administrative language of maintenir l’ordre lies a heavy colonial inheritance. The way France polices protest today descends directly from the counterinsurgency techniques and state violence tested in the colonies, in Indochina and above all in Algeria. Crowd control, surveillance, the quadrillage (space grid) of neighbourhoods: these methods were brought back to the metropole. Combined with this boomerang effect, throughout this history, the language of terrorism has been used to break resistance and grassroots mobilisation, going as far back as the lois scélérates (villainous laws) of 1893–1894 against anarchists.
The state of emergency is a case in point. The law of 3 April 1955 was drafted during the Algerian War. In my own work, I have shown how these measures were born in Algeria, then brought to the metropole to target and securitise a racialised population, what Rigouste calls the post-colonial body. Revived after the November 2015 attacks and normalised in 2017, some of these powers are now being used to restrict the right to protest, particularly discriminating, targeting, profiling and securitising the youth. Rigouste traces how the doctrine of the ‘enemy within’ travelled back from colonial counterinsurgency; Lambert maps the same continuum, from Algeria to the banlieues to Kanaky.
Each time, the pattern is similar. The movement is first depoliticised, and then the emergency powers are switched on. In 2005, after the deaths of Zyed and Bouna in Clichy-sous-Bois, the revolts of the quartiers populaires were reduced to violence and delinquency, and the government then dusted off the 1955 law to impose curfews. The targets were working-class youth, predominantly youth of colour. In May 2024, in Kanaky-New Caledonia, it happened again. The CCAT was described as a 'mafia-like' group by the Interior Minister, then came the state of emergency, curfews, and CCAT activists deported thousands of kilometres away to prisons in metropolitan France.
What is tested on colonised bodies is later deployed against working-class youth and people of colour, before being turned on everyone else. Césaire warned us about it; Graham calls it the boomerang effect. The exception is never a last resort in France, which raises the question of how exceptional it really is.
The exception made ordinary
The state of emergency concentrates extraordinary powers in the hands of the executive: curfews, house arrests, administrative searches, security perimeters, bans on gatherings. In 2017, after two years under the state of emergency that followed the November 2015 attacks, the SILT law was presented as the way out. In reality, it normalised it, importing the exception into everyday life through protection perimeters, MICAS (an ‘ordinary’ house arrest), closures of places of worship and home searches. As Huysmans argues, the exception does not need to be spectacular to be at work. SILT measures are still formally tied to terrorism prevention, but once a society gets used to the exception, it rarely goes away, and the door has already been pushed. During the first state of emergency, around COP21 in 2015, environmental activists were placed under house arrest. In 2016, prefects (state representatives in a French departement or region) used the same powers to ban protesters from the loi Travail demonstrations. The exception had already slipped towards protest ten years ago.
The repertoire has kept growing: on 19 October, the Préfet of Ille-et-Vilaine banned gatherings and set up security perimeters in Rennes, one of the very measures SILT brought into ordinary law, to stop protests before they could even begin. Protest itself is now being banned. On 22 October, the Préfet du Rhône prohibited all demonstrations in Lyon for Saturday 24 October (a prefectoral decision), and the President announced that only protests organised by unions and authorised by prefects would be allowed. Both are ways of silencing dissent. Meanwhile, in the middle of a curfew in Lyon, a far-right group marched at night without facing either the police or their violence.
Within protests, the nasse, or kettling, goes in the same direction. The nasse is a public order policing technique used in France, which consists of confining a group of people within a police cordon to prevent them from entering or leaving a given area. In another words to encage them. Jurists and associations such as the Ligue des droits de l'Homme denounce it as an intrusive deprivation of liberty imposed on simple protesters, and in 2021 the Conseil d'État annulled the provisions of the national doctrine on maintaining order that framed it. It is still used.
The curfew, from 1961 to 2026
Curfews are another measure the French state uses as a way to suppress dissent. On 5 October 1961, Paris police chief Maurice Papon imposed a curfew on 'Français musulmans d'Algérie' alone. When they marched peacefully against it on 17 October 1961, the state massacred them, and threw them into the Seine.
Exactly 65 years later, on 17 October 2026, the strike began. Curfews followed, not everywhere, in specific spaces targeting specific bodies. The echo is hard to miss: the same measure, aimed at the same bodies. Remember where the 2026 movement started.
The legal detail matters here. The curfew sits in the 1955 emergency law, yet no state of emergency has been declared. Mayors and prefects are imposing curfews in parts of Paris, in northern France and in Lyon using their ordinary police powers. A measure born from colonial exception can now be used without any exception being declared at all.
Rigouste explains what curfews are for: shaping a space-time in which the balance of power stays with the police, through curfews and quadrillage, and pushing confrontation into forms they control. This is exactly the narrative we heard after 17 October the police had been “overwhelmed”, so curfews, helicopters, patrols and soldiers became “necessary”. As Rigouste notes of the 2011 curfews on minors around Paris, such measures never only apply to their stated targets. They install a permanent occupation and intimidation that paralyses social life, a domination ever closer to military and colonial occupation.
Occupying the streets: army and police
From the curfew to the soldiers, there is only one step. On 20 October, Laurent Nuñez (the French Interior Minister) announced the deployment of the army alongside the police ahead of the second act of the mobilisation, on 24 October.
The soldiers belong to Opération Sentinelle, the armed force patrolling French streets, airports and monuments since January 2015. Officially an anti-terrorist presence, Sentinelle is now deployed against French citizens protesting for their livelihoods, and guarding the Élysée or Palais Matignon. This is not entirely new. In March 2019, after the Champs-Élysées riots of the Gilets jaunes' act XVIII, Sentinelle was mobilised to guard buildings and free up police for the streets. The RAID and the GIGN, elite units reserved for hostage situations, organised crime and terrorism, are also being deployed. Once again, the line between police and army is blurred in the name of maintaining order.
In the same way police and soldiers once quadrilled the Casbah in Algiers, French youth are now living something close to military occupation in their own neighbourhoods. Fassin showed, in his ethnography of the BAC, that this kind of policing was practised in the quartiers populaires long before it reached everyone else. And let's not forget that they are targeting children. The 2026 movement started in a high school, and we only have to look back to Mantes-la-Jolie in December 2018, where 151 high school students were made to kneel on the ground with their hands behind their heads, to know how the state sees its youth. Their crime? Shouting too loudly that they are suffocating under the cost of living and the undignified conditions of the Republic's schools.
From the streets to the courts
The repression does not stop in the street. It continues in the courtroom. The government’s second line of attack is penal: the Prime Minister promised a “massive” response, announcing a penal response rate of almost 80% for those placed in garde à vue (police custody). In practice, this means comparutions immédiates (fast-track trials). On paper, it is an ordinary procedure. Used on this scale, it works as a mass justice d'exception, with little time for the defence and heavy sentences. The offences used matter just as much. Since 2010, 'participation à un groupement en vue de commettre des violences' (participation in a group with a view to committing violence) allows the state to arrest people not for what they have done, but for what they might do. It was used massively against the Gilets Jaunes. It is pre-crime, exactly as Zedner, McCulloch and Pickering describe it in counterterrorism: punishing a supposed dangerousness rather than an act. And now 'criminalité en bande organisée' (crime committed by an organised gang) is joining the vocabulary. Codaccioni has shown how antiterrorist techniques migrate towards social movements, and October 2026 appears as a textbook case.
Whose violence is legitimate?
All of this comes back to one question: whose violence is acceptable, and whose is criminalised? In the aftermath of these protests, the state and the media immediately depoliticise the demonstrators. They become casseurs (looters). The word is not neutral; it is a weapon, and it has a history. It first appears in 1832, in a Le Figaro freshly bought by the July Monarchy, to recast the republicans who had just risen against the regime as ‘casseurs de vitres’: not political subjects with demands, but noise, disorder and broken glass. Almost two centuries later, the operation is the same. Calling protesters casseurs makes state violence look like a response rather than a choice, and turns a question of justice into a question of public order. Once a movement has been named this way, there is nothing left to listen to, only something to repress. Meanwhile, police violence, the so-called bavures (police brutality), is barely acknowledged, let alone condemned. The language of terrorism is an old political strategy to discredit, depoliticise, delegitimise and criminalise the voices of people who suffer and ask for social injustice to end. As Jackson and Stampnitzky have argued, calling someone a terrorist places them outside politics altogether: legitimate grievances become pathology. But violence is also a way to resist. Fanon understood it in Les Damnés de la terre, and Dorlin makes us ask who, historically, has been allowed to defend themselves, and who has not. “Power concedes nothing without a demand”, and social movement scholars have long documented the radical flank effect: non-violent resistance often gains its leverage precisely because of the pressure generated alongside it.
Conclusion
What is happening in France this October is neither an accident nor a sudden drift. It is the result of decades of exceptional measures, born in the colonies, normalised in 2017, and now turned on striking workers and high school students. Every time the state calls a movement violent, radical or ‘ultra-gauche’, it buys itself a little more exception, and the next movement inherits it. This post is a contribution to naming that violence for what it is and to Critical Terrorism Studies more broadly.