There is a dreary predictability to the death spirals of the European administrative state, but France remains uniquely committed to dressing tyranny in the vestments of bureaucratic routine. Confronted with weekend unrest, the authorities in Paris have reached for their favorite instrument of social hygiene: nightly curfews, decreed to remain in place for as long as necessary. One must admire the terrifying elasticity of that phrase. To the Prefect of Police, necessity is not an objective threshold of public safety; it is an open-ended credit line drawn against the civil liberties of several million citizens whose primary crime is attempting to walk home after dark.
Consider the sheer economic illiteracy of shutting down a metropolis by fiat. A curfew is not merely a suspension of the fundamental right to move freely through public space; it is a forced decapitation of the nocturnal economy. The corner bistro, the third-shift logistics warehouse, the rideshare driver attempting to earn an honest euro amidst France’s punitive tax regime—all are summarily extinguished by administrative decree. Frederic Bastiat warned us nearly two centuries ago about that which is seen and that which is not seen [1]. The interior minister sees an empty boulevard and congratulates himself on order restored; he does not see the millions of euros evaporated in canceled shifts, spoiled perishables, and shattered commercial contracts, all sacrificed to project the illusion of control.
[1] See Bastiat, Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (1850). Modern French policymakers appear to have studied this text strictly as a manual of what to inflict upon the productive classes.
The standard apologists of the Fifth Republic will predictably whine that property destruction necessitated an iron fist. This is the classic statist shell game: create the conditions for endemic social rot through an ossified welfare state, and then demand emergency powers to police the inevitable fallout. France boasts one of the highest public spending-to-GDP ratios in the developed world, paired with a labor market so calcified by union mandates that young and marginalized populations face generational unemployment. Having spent decades subsidizing dysfunction and criminalizing competitive labor, the French elite now acts surprised that the banlieues erupt. Their solution to social friction is precisely what one expects from a centralized bureaucracy: blanket house arrest.
True order is not the terrified quietude of a population locked inside their flats by armed gendarmes. It is the emergent, self-regulating peace of a free market and a free society, where the state’s sole, modest function is the swift and proportional defense of property rights against actual transgressors. Instead, the French state does the exact opposite: it fails entirely to protect shopkeepers from organized looters during the daylight, and then punishes the entire citizenry with indefinite confinement by night. It is collective punishment masquerading as public administration.
This paternalistic hysteria is hardly confined to the banks of the Seine, but France embraces it with a unique, Jacobin relish. When the state confesses that it cannot discern between a violent rioter and an accountant walking to the train station without imposing a general curfew, it has conceded its own intellectual and practical bankruptcy. A government that must lock up the innocent in order to police the guilty has ceased to govern; it merely occupies.
If the French electorate retains any appetite for liberty over subsidized docility, it will treat these curfews not as an unfortunate inconvenience, but as an intolerable usurpation. The curfew will not solve the grievance; it will merely delay the next conflagration while suffocating what little vitality remains in the Parisian market. One suspects, however, that the bureaucrats will find necessity lasting quite a long time indeed. Liberty is fragile, but the appetite of a panicked prefect for empty streets is boundless.
Cornelius Bragg