But opponents, including one of France’s leading judges dealing with terrorism cases, Marc Trévidic, say that the law’s text contradicts the prime minister’s assurances.
“It is a state lie,” said Pierre-Olivier Sur, the head of the Paris bar association. “This project was presented to us as a way to protect France against terrorism, and if that were the case, I would back it,” he said.
“But it is being done to put in place a sort of Patriot Act concerning the activities of each and everyone,” ..
France’s Push to Expand Surveillance Is Predictable but Possibly Futile
Despite the breadth of the proposed legislation, which was overwhelmingly passed by the lower house of Parliament on Tuesday, the increased surveillance would probably not have prevented Chérif and Saïd Kouachi from massacring 12 people at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the analysts said.
Nor would the added measures probably have headed off Amedy Coulibaly from taking hostages days later at a kosher grocery store, killing four of them, in addition to a police officer, they said.
“The Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were already targeted by the intelligence services,” Mr. Sur noted, and the authorities already have more information and suspects than they can possibly track with the current levels of resources and funding ..
.. And nowhere do those factors play a stronger role than in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe and has seen more of its citizens go to Syria and Iraq than any other European country.
.. Now, human rights and civil liberties advocates say their worry is that if the French legislation is enacted, the country will be in the vanguard of repressive states like Russia that use surveillance powers to monitor not only potential terrorists but also anyone who is seen as a threat to the government.
.. “My fear is that France is setting an example here and it encourages a race for the bottom on a global level,” said Cynthia Wong, a lawyer and senior Internet researcher for Human Rights Watch. “If France does it, why wouldn’t every other government do the same thing?”
The World We Have Gained: The Future of the French Revolution
The French Revolution has fallen out of favor.1 Even as recognition of its significance has spread, its reputation has suffered; for many, in the public and profession alike, it has become the harbinger of violence, terror, totalitarianism, and even genocide in the modern world. Edmund Burke seems to have won his argument with Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. His prophetic line of 1790—“In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows”—might be read as the epitaph of all the utopian visions spawned by the French Revolution
.. One of the last lessons he drew, in a letter of 1881, was the lesson of unpredictability. Although the French bourgeoisie had precisely defined demands before 1789, no Frenchman of the eighteenth century, Marx claimed, had the least idea before 1789 of how to get them satisfied.
.. Much has been written about how conspiracy fears and theories prepared the way for the Terror, and I do not contest the connection.
Lynn Hunt on the French Revolution
You make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that support a democratic political life. You do it in order to get a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure in place to make that possible. So the question becomes how do you get from the desire to the reality of democratic political life? What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain.
.. He basically says that countries develop a style of governing and that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that style of governing.
.. He wanted to argue that the problem with communism was that it was a false and contradictory ideology, and that you can’t change the world through ideology. You have to change the world through concrete political programmes.
.. It reveals that if you try to push for democracy without having an adequate institutional basis for it, you will end up with terror, violence, and the suppression of dissent. In short, you will end up with totalitarianism. So he’s taking the Tocqueville argument even further: Democracy can lead not just to despotism, but to totalitarianism.
.. One fact he mentions that surprised me, given the number of people he sent to their death, is that Robespierre started out as an opponent of capital punishment.
.. What the revolution showed is that it would, in future, be impossible to ignore the vast mass of the people. There will be many solutions to that problem. Some of those solutions won’t be so great. One could argue that fascism and communism are both different answers to, “What do you do about incorporating the mass of the people into the polity?” But representative forms of government will also be one very important example.