The Criminalization of Solidarity (With Louis Witter)
Journalist Louis Witter joins Becoming French to speak about a new proposal to criminalize aiding foreigners.
Last week, French Interior Minister Bruno Rétailleau announced plans to crack down on aid organizations that provide legal assistance to foreigners living in France, including those with outstanding deportation notices. This death by a thousand cuts strategy aims to make it more difficult for aid groups to provide often life-saving care to France’s most vulnerable populations.
Journalist and photographer Louis Witter has documented the French state’s criminalization of migrants and aid workers in Calais, in northern France, which he calls a “laboratory” for the policies later adopted throughout the country. His 2023 book “La Battue, l'Etat, la police et les étrangers” (“The Hunt: The State, the Police and Foreigners”) compared the strategy of frequently and often violent dismantling shelters used by migrants and refugees, called “no point of fixation,” to a similar strategy employed by French hunters.
Louis spoke with Becoming French about his work and the most recent pronouncements of Macron’s hard-line Interior Minister.
Phineas Rueckert: Thanks again for doing this interview with me. I wanted to start with your book, “La Battue, l'Etat, la police et les étrangers” (“The Hunt: The State, the Police and Foreigners”). Basically it's about what I would call the tracking down of exiled people in France. So, just to start: what is the concept of “la battue”? Could you describe the thesis of the book?
Louis Witter: So initially, I started my work in Calais in 2015 in the what was known as “The Jungle” — the biggest shantytown in Europe. At its peak, there were more than 10,000 people surviving in the camp. And in 2016, the Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, a Socialist minister under François Hollande, decided to evict the camp and clear Calais. Since then, a policy has been put in place at the Franco-British border on the part of the French authorities. It's called the “zero point of fixation” strategy.
How does this work on a day-to-day basis? Basically, the police arrive every 48 hours at the Calais camps and evict people from their tents and living quarters. The people generally return within minutes and resettle, even if for some of them their tents have been confiscated and their personal belongings confiscated or destroyed.
The term “battue” comes from the world of hunting, and this is what we see in many French forests: 20 or 30 hunters lined up in a row, luring their prey into a forest to hunt them. The reason I chose this title — which, while not intended to be provocative, is deliberately interpelling — is because what we're witnessing in Calais is really a daily manhunt. There's an animalization of the people who survive in these camps and it's become public policy since 2017.
Phineas Rueckert: That flows very well into the second question I wanted to ask you. Obviously in the book, you’re really focused on the city of Calais, which is a bit of a testing ground for these strategies. But have we seen that this strategy is now being applied all over France?
Louis Witter: So, in my opinion, there are two laboratories in France, at the administrative level. Calais, and Mayotte in the overseas territories. In fact, the practices we saw in Calais have spread. In Mayotte, they were implemented during the recent destruction of shantytowns (in a military operation called Wuambushu, which was initiated by former French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin). But these practices of hunting exiled or undocumented people, they took place in exactly the same way in Paris at the time of the Olympic Games in particular. In the months leading up to the Olympic Games, all of the camps in the broader Paris region and inside of Paris proper were evicted one by one to clear the way and to push people to other places in France, to prevent them from being visible to the tourists and athletes from all over the world who came (to Paris).
On the functional side, there's also the installation of boulders in public space, for example. What we've seen in Calais, for example, is the town hall or the local authorities laying boulders on the sites of former camps to prevent people from returning and to prevent associations from coming to provide food and water. And we saw exactly the same strategy put in place in Paris before the Olympic Games: some camps were completely fenced off, like under the Stalingrad metro station, and boulders were laid to prevent people from moving in.
Phineas Rueckert: Yeah, that's exactly it. I've done some reporting on this topic in Paris, and there were also quite a few squat evacuations next to future Olympic sites.
The main subject I wanted to discuss with you is what I'd call the criminalization of aid to foreigners. Not only are foreigners and exiles themselves being hunted down, but more and more, there's a desire to criminalize those who help, i.e. those who help open squats, those who house migrants or exiles in their homes, even people who distribute food. So I imagine you may have seen this in Calais too, this desire on the part of French public policy to criminalize aid associations. And now we also have (current Prime Minister) Bruno Retailleau saying that he’s going to crack down on these associations. So, is this something you've looked at? Why criminalize the people who are helping, supporting foreigners, in addition to foreigners themselves?
Louis Witter: So on the criminalization of solidarity, there are several aspects. In Calais, if you go back a bit in time, since the strategy of zero point of fixation, we've seen a lot of different strategies on the part of the police and the gendarmerie to fine volunteers. Generally speaking, volunteers don't have a lot of money themselves, so to discourage them, (the police) will often fine them for vehicle violations, for example. Many of these vehicles are tasked with transporting food, clothing or emergency supplies. If they have a defect such as badly inflated tires, a slightly bent rear-view mirror, etc., the police are going to be intransigent. I even remember one day when activists were ticketed in Calais for missing tires. I'm not quite sure what that means. Does it mean they were driving without tires? It seems pretty strange to me. But these are all things that associations are obliged to bear financially, even though they already have quite enormous operating costs and rely mainly on donations. So it's quite discouraging.
This also took place during the Covid lockdown in France, when volunteers were penalized. In France, when you had to go out during the Covid, you had to fill in a certificate on your honor. You could check off the box for “emergency help for people in need,” whether they were homeless or dependent relatives or what have you. In Calais, volunteers were systematically fined for failing to comply with the confinement requirement, even though they were providing emergency assistance to people in need. In Calais, for over a year, there was also a prefectoral decree banning the distribution of free food and water. In other words, if you gave out a sandwich, a glass of water or a bottle of water to someone who needed it, no matter who they were, exiled or not, you were fined €135.
So that's for Calais. Now, for several years at other borders in France too, solidarity has been criminalized. I'm thinking of Cédric Herrou, (a French farmer who was prosecuted and acquitted for lodging migrants at his home), or the “Briançon Seven” (a group of seven aide workers who were tried for ‘human trafficking’ for their work assisting migrants at the French-Italian border). And again, the day before yesterday in the Basque country, on the French-Spanish border, seven activists were summoned by the OLTIM (Office de lutte contre le trafic illicite de migrants, or The Office of the Fight Against Illegal Trafficking of Migrants). They're being prosecuted for aiding illegal entry in an organized gang — for helping people, not necessarily to cross, but often to move along their journey by dropping them off by car in Bayonne. So we see a lot of arrests of volunteers to scare them, a lot of fines to discourage them, and that's frankly more and more the case, in Calais and on other borders.
Phineas Rueckert: Yes, exactly. And that fits in with what was said yesterday by the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Rétailleau. Basically, he said that, in administrative detention centers, NGOs and aid organizations shouldn't be there, because they're — to use his own words — “judge and jury,” which I find rather insane, because they really have no possibility of affecting the fate of the person in the administrative detention center (or CRA, for short). Why is Bruno Rétailleau attacking NGOs that help in the CRAs?
Louis Witter: Well, I think that politically, for several years, there has also been a criminalization of NGOs more broadly. I know that the mayor of Calais has taken aim in particular at Utopia 56 (an organization that helps refugees and migrants find temporary housing with French citizens). Successive ministers of the interior over the last few years — even decades — have accused associations of being the accomplices of smugglers, of being the source of trafficking, etc., when in fact, these groups are just making up for the state's shortcomings in basic areas such as food, legal aid, etc.
The last legislative elections saw a historic breakthrough for the Rassemblement national (National Rally, or RN) and far-right parties in France. But unfortunately, it's been several years now that this extreme right-wing rhetoric, with its xenophobic discourse, has infiltrated the media and society more and more. So what Rétailleau is doing is clearly reaching out to the RN, reaching out to ideologues that would like for borders to be more and more repressive for both caregivers and exiles. I think it's just a political strategy aimed at reassuring that part of the French population on the far right and which has made immigration and the fight against it its priority in recent years. But as a result, we're clearly not ruled by a governing coalition, in my opinion, that is equally represented by the left and the right. We're ruled by a government that's leaning more to the far right.
Phineas Rueckert: Exactly. I'll let you go in a minute because I know it's a smoke break, it doesn't last very long, but I'll just go to a question that's a bit more global. It's kind of the point of this Substack I've created. Even for me, as a foreigner who's very privileged, the procedure of applying for French nationality, of going every year to the police headquarters to renew my visa, was incredibly complicated. And for other less privileged people, even more so. So basically, the question is how did we get to a point in this country where we're saying that French nationality, French rights are given out willy nilly to whoever wants them, while really this system is incredibly difficult to navigate? Where does this rhetoric come from, and how does that clash with your field experience, having talked to lots of people in different situations?
Louis Witter: So in my opinion, this is a trend that’s taking place not just on a national level, but on a European level and even more broadly on a global level. We're living in an ultra-globalized world, where population movements are perhaps easier than ever before. And we can see that in Europe, for example, only Spain is trying to be open and welcoming, saying for example that Spain has always been a land of transit, integration and immigration. (Prime Minister Pedro) Sanchez has toured some of the African countries from which people leave in the effort to try and reach agreements on safe routes. But he's really an exception and a rather dissonant voice in the European Union.
In the European Union, whether it's in Hungary, Italy or even the UK, anti-immigration rhetoric is becoming more and more prevalent, and I think the media have a lot to do with this, as they've let a lot of bullshit be spouted on the subject. I'm thinking in particular of television, which is watched by a lot of people. It's very difficult to fact-check what's being said live, for example, and it's not always done. In other words, all the fantasies that emerge, particularly on the far right, about immigration, welfare, etc., have been infused little by little by the media. They've gradually infused into society without us, perhaps as journalists, having done the necessary work of verification and explanation, and that's why people believe, I'm sorry to use this word, but people believe bullshit.
The far-right votes come mostly from rural areas. My family comes from a rural background and I have quite a few friends from rural areas too. And it's true that, when you talk to them, there's a whole bunch of fantasies surrounding immigration, particularly about welfare benefits, about the fact that, ‘Oh, they arrive and in two months they've got an apartment,’ and it's all false. It’s something that you have to deconstruct little by little, while underlining the extremely racist dimension of these fantasies. But it's a very complicated job, and I think the reason we're where we are today is because this work hasn't been done for years, and we've let too much be said. We've let people say too much, we've let people lie too much, especially on television, on these subjects.
Phineas Rueckert: Yes, absolutely. And thank you for talking about the personal side. I think it's important that everybody comes from their own context. That's all I wanted to ask you. Is there anything else you think is important to say before we hang up?
Louis Witter: I think eventually, if these aid organizations are suppressed for example, or their funds greatly reduced, it will necessarily be up to the state to take charge of these things. Because, whether in Calais or in the CRAs, we can't leave people without access to legal services, for example. That would be in breach of European laws, human rights conventions and so on. So it would fall to the state. I think it's something that's impossible to achieve, but that flatters part of the far-right electorate.