In a matter of hours after the November 13 Paris attacks, the government declared a state of national emergency in France. This had only happened a handful of times before – during France’s conflict with Algeria in the 50s and 60s, in New Caledonia in 1984, and in 2005 when three weeks of violent riots swept the nation’s suburbs.
Such was the scale of the deadly attacks in Paris and the northern suburb of Saint-Denis that it pushed then president François Hollande to enact exceptional legal framework – giving the authorities more power to pursue terrorists and starting a rollback on civil liberties that is still under way today.
The sweeping new laws enacted in the wake of the attacks were far reaching and supposed to be temporary.
Police were given the power to place under house arrest, without trial, “any person” for whom there were “serious grounds” to believe they posed a threat to public safety or order.
The authorities could order a search on any location used by someone thought to pose the same threat – with a few exemptions for spaces used by politicians, legal professionals and journalists.
Administrative authorities gained the right to seize legally owned weapons and ammunition from owners.
And the government was allowed to block any websites thought to be promoting or inciting terrorism and to dissolve charitable organisations that it judged undermined public order.
“In the name of terrorism, which justified everything, extensive powers were given to the executive branch,” says Nathalie Tehio, president of rights organisation la Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH).
The new expansive powers enabled the French authorities to get quick results when tracking down the perpetrators of the Paris attacks in the weeks following the incident – but they were soon used for other purposes.
“There were an enormous amount of police searches that were not necessarily linked to terrorism but that the police used for other investigations, for legal purposes, but without approval from a judge,” adds Tehio.
The legal framework provided by the state of emergency gave the French government the power to ban protests and deter other forms of activism, even if they had no connection to the attacks, which it did.
As France prepared to host the COP21 environmental summit in December 2015, several dozen climate activists found that they had been placed under house arrest for the duration of the conference.
‘Exceptional measures’
The state of emergency was initially supposed to last for three months, but was soon extended to May 2016. Then, after more terrorist attacks in Nice on July 14, 2016, it was extended three more times, before finally being lifted on November 1, 2017, almost two years after it was first introduced.
“The problem is that the longer the delay in ending the state of emergency, the harder it is to decide to stop,” says Tehio.
During the two years the legal framework was in place, “the public became accustomed to the idea that these exceptional measures were possible and they went from something that should be exceptional to something that is used to manage the public,” she added.
Shortly before France did end its state of emergency, the government decided to hang on to some of the powers it enabled. An October 2017 anti-terrorism law known as Silt, (La loi Sécurité intérieure et Lutte contre le terrorisme), “integrated measures introduced during the state of emergency into every day law”, says Tehio.
House arrest orders were renamed control and surveillance measures, or Micas, (mesures individuelles de contrôle administratif et de surveillance) and administrative searches became known as home visits (visites domiciliaires).
Under the law, local authorities were granted the additional rights to control access by establishing security perimeters around locations they considered prime targets for terrorist acts.
The Micas, in particular, demonstrate how the law has eroded the rights of people in France. “The safeguards that are supposed to exist on paper are very relative in practice,” says specialist Nicolas Klausser, from legal research organisation, le Centre de recherches sociologiques sur le droit et les institutions pénales (Cesdip).
“Ninety percent of Micas are approved by administrative judges, who almost never question intelligence reports sent to them by the interior ministry. Before 2015, the interior ministry could only impose asset freezes or travel bans on French nationals, but now it has a considerably wider range of measures at its disposal," he adds.
Today, having any kind of connection to individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses could be enough to prompt a Micas or a home visit, as security figures from the 2024 Paris Olympic games indicate.
A parliamentary security report on the games reported 626 home visits and 547 Micas were implemented during the Olympic period, equivalent to “a level four to five times higher than the annual average observed since 2017”.
The figure is evidence of “the extended scope” of the amount of police interventions the type of person the law is able to target, the researcher says, with serious consequences for those involved who may find themselves unable to work and at risk of losing their income.
‘Neutralising internal enemies’
A steady creep of laws since 2017 have reinforced France’s legal arsenal to fight against terrorism and expanded the reach of the intelligence services and the military.
In this timeframe, major events, such as the Olympics and the Covid pandemic, have provided unique contexts that have accelerated an overall restriction on individual freedoms.
In the past three years, a 2021 law obliged charities receiving public subsidies to sign a “republican commitment contract”, reinforcing compliance with the principles of the Republic, a 2022 law authorised the use of surveillance drones on internal security grounds and a 2023 law, brought in for use during the Olympics, allowed the use of algorithmic video surveillance on an experimental basis until March, 2025.
Read moreCritics claim Paris using 2024 Games to introduce Big Brother video surveillance
“First they say it’s experimental, then it becomes normal,” says Tehio. “It’s a maddening engine of repression that never has enough. First it's drones, then AI, then facial recognition. For a long time we pointed the finger at China and said it was a dictatorship [for using such surveillance methods] but now France finds itself doing the same thing.”
The government insists that such measures are necessary to counter terrorism, which is still a high-level threat in France according to the intelligence services.
The director of France’s anti-terror unit, la Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI), said in February 2025 that 79 planned attacks had been prevented in France since 2015.
“It’s a standard bit of rhetoric from the interior ministry, These measures were initially intended to ‘remove doubts' and in practice they are often not directly linked to imminent threats,” says Klausser.
“The existence of these measures clouds the classic boundary between administrative and criminal law. The State is drawing on the same mechanisms used in former colonies or immigration law to neutralise its internal enemies,” he adds.
The researcher notes the potential danger of a future far-right government being tempted to further expand the scope of individuals targeted by such tools.
But already in France the far-reaching power of the judiciary is increasingly woven into life, even for law-abiding citizens. An Amnesty International report found that of around 11,000 people arrested during France’s Yellow Vest protests in 2018-19, just 3,000 led to convictions.
When President Emmanuel Macron was travelling the country in spring 2023 amid contested pension reforms, protesters who wanted to show opposition by banging pots and pans were blocked from approaching areas where the president might have been.
"The risk is that we become accustomed to the loss of freedom, surveillance, and an increasingly authoritarian state,” says Tehio. “It’s a dangerous trend that is currently under way, leading towards the dismantling of all dissent. Many people are now giving up on protesting, including advocacy organisations. We are in the process of devitalising our democracy.”
This article was adapted from the original in French by Joanna York.
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