Emmanuel Macron has held the record for dissolving associations since the start of the Fifth Republic, but he is the second head of state to have had the most recourse to this power since its creation in 1936, behind General De Gaulle.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin wants to dissolve the Les Uprisings of the Earth movement, responsible according to him for the clashes during the demonstration against the alternative water reserves – the “basins” – in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres) at the end of March. The movement challenges the procedure and denounces a decision “freedom”.
This is an opportunity to take stock of this power to dissolve the government, created in 1936 to ban combat groups and private militias in order to protect the Republic after the far-right and nationalist militants of the Action Française attempted to overthrow it in 1934.
A record of dissolutions under the Fifth Republic
This power has been used in particular by Emmanuel Macron since his first election in 2017. To date, while the dissolution of the Earth Uprisings is not yet effective, 33 decrees to ban an association or a de facto group have been published. since his inauguration. This is a record for a president since the beginning of the Fifth Republic.
But if we go back to the creation of this power of dissolution in 1936, Emmanuel Macron is in second position, behind General de Gaulle. Romain Rambaud, professor of public law at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, has carefully identified all these prohibitions between 1936 and 2013 to fuel his research. Franceinfo has applied the same method to complete its data and include the last few years, up to the last two dissolutions pronounced on February 1, 2023.
These data show first of all that 48 associations or groups were banned in 12 years under General de Gaulle, first when he was at the head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic between 1944 and 1946, then during his two terms from 1959 to 1969.
Waves of very political dissolutions
But above all, they make it possible to realize the extent to which dissolutions are linked to historical events, to current events and to the orientations of the political powers in place. Prohibitions experienced a first peak in 1944, under De Gaulle, at the end of the Second World War. Thirteen organizations linked to collaboration during the Nazi occupation were banned by ordinance, including the Tricolor Legion, the Parti franciste and La Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-Mer. The second peak came in 1968, only a month after the events of May, still under De Gaulle, and targeted far-left associations such as La Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, La Voix Ouvrière and L’Union des jeunesses Communistes Marxistes Léninistes.
Professor Romain Rambaud notes that the law of January 10, 1936 allowing the dissolution of combat groups and private militias – since replaced by article L212-1 of the Internal Security Code – contained a certain “ductility”. In other words, it can be applied quite flexibly depending on political ambitions. “VSThis law served as a solid foundation for the policy of the French State to maintain its colonial Empire”underlines the specialist in an article for the Review of fundamental rights and freedomsbefore qualifying: “This law could then be used in the opposite political sense, when France accepted the process of decolonization”.
Thus, several Vietnamese, Cameroonian or Algerian independence organizations were dissolved in the 1950s, while France clung to its colonial Empire. But after General de Gaulle’s speech in 1958, when he made the famous “I got you” as far as Algerians are concerned, the trend has completely reversed and several militant groups for French Algeria have been banned, including the Secret Army Organization (OAS).
The extreme right and the Islamists, privileged targets
After De Gaulle, the dissolutions have largely decreased: seven under Georges Pompidou, two under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a rebound to fourteen under François Mitterrand against nationalist organizations, notably Corsican, three under Jacques Chirac and two under Nicolas Sarkozy.
Finally, several events restart the upward trend under François Hollande who signs ten decrees of dissolution. After the death of anti-fascist activist Clément Méric in 2013, several far-right groups were banned. “Beyond the legitimate desire to fight against such small groups, this arsenal was used for political purposes. It was more broadly part of a scheme aimed at anchoring presidential, governmental but also ministerial action ‘on the left’, while this was contested from an economic and social point of view.analysis Romain Rambaud, recalling that the Minister of the Interior at the time, Manuel Valls, said he wanted “to win democracy against the far right” but above all “to win the left”.
The attacks of 2015 and 2016 were the starting points for another wave of bans, this time targeting certain Muslim associations, accused of promoting terrorism. Thus are dissolved the Association of Muslims of Lagny-sur-Marne, The Return to Muslim Sources and theRahma de Torcy Marne-la-Vallée association. After rising again under François Hollande, the bans soared under Emmanuel Macron, still mainly targeting the same groups: the far right on one side and associations suspected of Islamism on the other.
Only nine dissolutions suspended or canceled
These dissolutions can obviously be contested. It is possible to make a referral to the Board ofEtat to suspend them urgently, an appeal to have them canceled – the procedure then takes longer – or even to go before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). But the procedure has had very little success in history: according to the calculations of franceinfo, out of 162 associations or groups which have been banned, only nine have succeeded in obtaining a suspension or cancellation. This is the case of the France-Vietnam association in 1953, the Internationalist Communist Organization in 1968 and the Antifascist Group Lyon and surroundings in 2022.
The vast majority of requests for cancellation or suspension are rejected, such as those of Barakacity, the Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and the Black African Defense League (LDNA). But even if canceled, the president can sign a new executive order to try banning again.
“The control of the Council of State is a ‘normal’ control of the legal qualification of the facts and essentially that, and is not a real control of proportionality”, observes Romain Rambaud. That is to say that the Council of State only verifies the conformity of the decree of dissolution with the law. He does not say whether the President of the Republic is right or not. In other words, “it is sufficient that the facts stated fall into one of the categories provided for by law for the dissolution to be pronounced.. So much so that the specialist dubbed the 1936 law a “weapon of mass dissolution”.