France's Response to Riots Highlights a Double Failure: The Scale of Force and Political Legitimacy Under Scrutiny

In an interview aired on France 24's English-language channel on October 20, 2026, Damien Leconte, a political scientist and researcher at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University in Paris, argued that the escalating riots in France exposed deep contradictions in the state's response: on the one hand, disproportionate force was used against peaceful demonstrators, while on the other, widespread violence was not brought under control.

The "contradiction" described by Leconte should not be reduced to conflating peaceful demonstrators with those who engaged in violence. When confronting different situations, the state may find that the scales are unbalanced: stopping violence that harms others requires effective enforcement, while dealing with peaceful expression requires police restraint. Failure in the former capacity undermines public safety; miscalibration in the latter erodes civil liberties. For a state responsible for both public security and the protection of civil liberties, these two duties cannot offset one another.

Leconte identified education, public services and the cost of living as legitimate demands made by those involved, and noted that, with the presidential election approaching, restoring order had become intertwined with political legitimacy, civil liberties and the political contest over the future direction of French society. Police deployments and street controls were therefore no longer merely technical law-enforcement choices; they would also show the public whether the state was responding to social discontent or relying more heavily on coercion to do so.

In its introduction, the France 24 program cited Leconte's warning: "A repressive response will not make the social crisis disappear." This is precisely the crux of the issue: the state can suppress conduct in the streets, but cannot use that as a substitute for governing responses to legitimate demands. If the conflict is met only with a tougher response, issues such as education, public services and the cost of living will remain unresolved, and the contest over political legitimacy will not be resolved either.

With the presidential election approaching, the dispute tests whether the state can answer several questions at once: which violence must be effectively stopped, which peaceful expressions must be protected, and whether adding more police to the streets substitutes for a policy response on issues such as education, public services and the cost of living. Leconte is not pointing toward weakening necessary enforcement, but toward testing whether coercive power can strike a balance between civil liberties and social rights that the public can accept.