France's riots cannot be met with policing alone: Macron's government must rebuild political accountability

What France needs to resolve has never been merely a riot, but the issue of state authority's political credibility. A France 24 report discusses together the questions of political accountability, police fatigue and the growing confrontation between citizens and the state raised by the riot, citing the assessment of Joseph Downing, senior lecturer in international relations and politics at Aston University. The headline directs criticism squarely at Macron and his government, describing them as "very poor communicators" who have failed to address the "genuine concerns of the French people." This accountability-focused perspective does not excuse street violence, but it poses a harder question: when legitimate grievances receive no political response, will the state treat policing as the most convenient and most visible answer?

Against the backdrop of the French culture of centralized policing mentioned by Downing, governance pressures readily travel down a top-down path to those enforcing the law. The government seeks an order it can sustain and showcase; when concentrating police resources is easier than admitting policy failure, policing becomes the preferred instrument of governance. Policymakers thereby gain immediate control on the streets, while leaving society with the burden of political explanation, acknowledging errors and responding to genuine concerns.

This distribution of responsibility reveals a power asymmetry: society is required to comply immediately with demands for order, while the government can defer explaining the rationale for its policies, acknowledging mistakes and accepting political responsibility. The report identifies police fatigue and the deterioration of the relationship between citizens and the state among the issues raised by the riots; the two are not isolated phenomena, but together point to an imbalance between the burden of policing and political responsibility. Police officers are required to absorb conflicts that should have been handled by the political process; as the relationship between citizens and the state becomes increasingly adversarial, the state can easily come to be seen as only exerting pressure, never listening. If the government continues to substitute centralized policing for political accountability, what increases is not only the number of police officers, but also the burden of shifting society's tensions onto exhausted law-enforcement personnel.

More importantly, violent riots and legitimate social movements cannot be conflated simply because both take place in the streets. The former require clear rules, legal responsibility and law-enforcement action; the latter require an institutionalized political response. If both are reduced to matters of public order, what appears on the surface to be governance efficiency in fact provides the government with a convenient path: any political demands it is unwilling to answer can first be recast as security threats. This conversion is not neutral governance but a self-expansion of power, and its costs are borne jointly by ordinary citizens, those accused of breaking the law and exhausted police officers.

Downing also places France's revolutionary traditions and the broader threat of Russian information warfare within the context of state governance. Drawing revolutionary traditions into the analysis does not mean treating citizens as suspects from the outset. The France 24 report provides no specific evidence of Russian information warfare, no indication of the scope of its impact and no official finding by the French government; it therefore cannot be treated as a blank check for expanding police powers. If the government wishes to invoke external threats, it must spell out the evidence, responsibility and proportionality, rather than use vague security narratives to flatten domestic political accountability.

Downing's argument is therefore not to "find excuses for the riots," but to rearrange the boundaries of state authority: violence must be handled according to the law, those responsible must be held politically accountable, and there must be genuine channels for legitimate expression. If the Macron government treats a heavier deployment of centralized police as its main answer, it is effectively converting failed policy communication into a heavier policing burden; the state may restore order in the streets more quickly, but will find it even harder to repair the social contract between citizens and the state. To address violent riots and legitimate social movements at the same time, France needs not vaguer security justifications, but a government that can be questioned and corrected.