Oppose the state of emergency in France!

We call on the French working class and the genuinely left-wing elements in the population, for whom the defense of democratic rights and the fight for social equality still has meaning, to come to the defense of the impoverished youth and offer a political perspective in the struggle with sclerotic French capitalism.

The events in the working class suburbs of Paris and hundreds of other towns and cities have their tragic and desperate element, but the blame for the violence lies entirely with the French political establishment, including its “left” and “far left” wings, who are essentially satisfied with the status quo and uninterested in the fate of the working class youth, condemned to bleak lives in wretched surroundings.

The state of emergency announced November 8, along with the call-up of police reservists, authorizes local governments to impose curfews and permits police to conduct raids and searches without warrants. The emergency decree, made possible by a 1955 law, will be in effect for 12 days, but the National Assembly can pass a law extending it, “if necessary.” The curfew was scheduled to take effect at midnight Tuesday in areas yet to be determined. Disobedience could result in a sentence of up to two months in prison, a fine of 3,750 euros, or both.

Under the decree, local officials have the power to place people under house arrest and demand that weapons be handed over. Public spaces can be closed down. The law gives the government the power to restrict freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and to shut down theaters.

The state-run radio station France Inter reported November 8 that no restrictions would be applied to the press and the theater, but a government spokesman refused to confirm this.

The mass general strike of 1968 did not precipitate such a state of emergency. The 1955 law is most associated, and certainly in the minds of the older generation of North African descent, with the violence and torture perpetrated by the French state on the Algerian population and Algerian immigrants in France in the 1950s and 1960s.

On October 17, 1961, for instance, during a mass protest in Paris against a similar emergency curfew, police massacred at least 50 and perhaps as many as 200 Algerian immigrants, beating some of them to death in the courtyard of police headquarters and throwing others, wounded, into the Seine.

Announcing the details of the measure in a crowded National Assembly Tuesday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared that the “restoration of order is a prerequisite ... We face determined individuals, structured gangs, organized criminality, which will not shrink from any means of making disorder and violence reign.”

“The Republic is at a moment of truth ... the violence must stop,” Villepin told the French parliament, adding that the government took “these events as a warning and as an appeal.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/fran-n09.shtml