On 17 October, protests against the cost of living ended in rioting in towns across France. The Interior Ministry counted 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured. The right answered at once. The next evening on BFM-TV, the Les Républicains MEP François-Xavier Bellamy turned to Philippe Poutou, our comrade in the NPA, and asked him why he wasn’t in prison. Alexis Corbière, sitting beside them, asked whether the right now wanted to ban demonstrations and put Poutou in jail. Bruno Retailleau, LR’s presidential candidate, blames a “convergence” of the far left and “racailles”, and wants a state of emergency and a new loi anti-casseurs.
It didn’t start on 17 October. On 1 October, while school students were blockading their lycées, Retailleau said that “the question of banning LFI” now arose, calling it a party that “is trying to organise insurrection”. He admitted a ban would be “very difficult in law”, but said he was putting it into public debate. The government accused LFI of encouraging and exploiting the school students’ movement, and the Paris police prefect reported the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, to prosecutors for “provocation to commit an offence”. Razmig Keucheyan, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Löwy and Ugo Palheta warned in the piece ACR published on 18 October that the legal framework for banning LFI is already in place, and that a far-right president would only need to “press the button”.
Nobody should treat this as noise. It’s the opening of an argument for repression, and the French state has made that argument before.
We’ve gone back through the Red Mole archive to see how it went last time. The record is long, and it teaches the same lessons each time.
A short history of the bans
Occupation and liberation. The French Trotskyists paid heavily in the war. By the count published in New York in January 1946, nearly thirty members were shot by the Gestapo, died in Auschwitz, Dora and other camps, or were killed by the Vichy militia. Two were among the hostages shot at Châteaubriant in 1941. Marcel Hic, one of the founders of the organisation, died in a camp in 1944. Liberation brought only half-legality. The party’s meetings were broken up, its paper La Vérité was refused legal publication, and its members were arrested again and again. Pierre Frank had already been sentenced in his absence in 1939 and interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, as his obituary in Inprecor records.
The Algerian war. Frank was arrested and convicted again for helping the FLN. Michel Raptis (Pablo), the Fourth International’s secretary, and the Dutch Trotskyist Sal Santen were held for thirteen months in Amsterdam before they came to trial in 1961. The prosecution tried to present their work for the Algerian revolution as ordinary crime. The International said the case was prepared by French, Dutch and German police, with the FBI in the background. A campaign of committees, witnesses and student demonstrations in the streets of Amsterdam turned the hearing round. They got fifteen months, which meant release that September, and the trial became a trial of colonialism.
June 1968. On 12 June, with the general strike ebbing, de Gaulle’s government dissolved the JCR, the PCI and the other organisations of the far left, and banned street demonstrations for the election campaign. Alain Krivine was arrested on 10 July for keeping the JCR going. He was never tried. The state put him into the army instead, as a private. Frank was held for “plotting against the security of the state”.
The ban didn’t work. In April 1969 the JCR and PCI merged to form the Ligue communiste, and Krivine stood for president as a conscript. Five thousand people filled the Mutualité to hear him.
1970. The repression didn’t stop at bans. In 1970 French conscripts were court-martialled at Rennes and Landau for discussing politics in the ranks, and people were charged for pasting up posters for soldiers’ rights. That was the year the loi anti-casseurs arrived, making the organisers of a demonstration answerable for what others did on it.
June 1973. The Ligue called a counter-demonstration against a racist meeting held by the neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau at the Mutualité. The police protected the fascists. Then around a hundred police raided the Ligue’s headquarters at dawn without warrants. They broke down doors, wrecked the bookshop and took away two sacks of documents. Krivine and Pierre Rousset were jailed. The government dissolved the Ligue and Ordre Nouveau on the same day.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International named the trick at once: “No one has been fooled by the false symmetry invoked by the French government in simultaneously dissolving the Ligue Communiste and the pro-Nazi organization Ordre Nouveau.” [scan] More than two thousand people, and many CGT, CFDT and FEN union branches, signed an appeal that said the same. By dissolving both “and so putting them on the same level”, the government wanted to look as if it was answering public opinion. [scan] The signatories also pointed out that the government had an anti-racism law from 1972 it could have used against Ordre Nouveau. It chose a 1936 law instead, so it could lump the two together.
The government threatened the Ligue’s leaders with the State Security Court, with the loi anti-casseurs, and with charges of attempted murder. Krivine was charged as the organiser of a demonstration, for what happened on it.
Why they do it
Pierre Frank’s analysis, written that summer, still reads as if it was written for this autumn. The government was weak. It had won an election, but the movement it faced kept growing: school students, women defying the abortion law, immigrant workers at Renault, and the Lip workers making and selling watches without a boss. The repression, Frank wrote, was “an operation of a preventive character, aimed at decapitating, before the great trials ahead, the strongest and most vigorous organisation of the far left”. [scan] It was carried out in the belief that it wouldn’t unite the Communist and Socialist parties.
That is the pattern. A weak government facing a rising movement looks for the organisation it can isolate. It pairs that organisation with the far right so that the attack looks even-handed. Then it makes the organisers answer for the street.
Blaming LFI for the school students’ revolt, and the far left for the riots, is that same argument scaled up to a whole party, and asking Poutou on live television why he isn’t in prison goes with it. In 1973, as now, the school students were in the streets first. And Retailleau’s new loi anti-casseurs would revive the very law the Ligue’s defenders denounced in 1973. Talk of banning LFI goes one step further. In 1973 the state dissolved an organisation of a few thousand. A ban on LFI would dissolve the party that won 22% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 presidential election.
What beat it
Unity. The government’s bet in 1973 failed. Within days the whole workers’ movement had come to the Ligue’s defence: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the CGT, the CFDT, FO and the teachers’ unions. Even the magistrates’ union protested. Jacques Duclos of the PCF took part in the protest meeting at the Cirque d’Hiver, although the party’s leader, Georges Marchais, had only recently been denouncing “Marcellin-style leftists”. Frank argued that after this it would be very hard for the PCF ever again to say that Trotskyism was outside the workers’ movement.
The rivals of the Ligue came too. In London, Gerry Healy’s Workers Press still called the Ligue “Pabloite”, but it printed an appeal for the whole British labour movement to oppose the ban. A democratic right that you defend only for your friends isn’t a right.
Solidarity abroad. Within three weeks the ban was an international issue. There were demonstrations in fifteen cities in the United States and in Canada and Quebec. Five thousand marched in West Berlin and two thousand in Frankfurt, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke spoke. In London seventy IMG members occupied the French Tourist Board in Piccadilly while fifty more picketed outside. Then came a picket of the embassy and a march from Hyde Park to the embassy, with speakers promised from IS, Workers Fight, Militant, the Chartists and the Communist Party. John Gollan, the CP’s general secretary, signed the protest letter to President Pompidou. The Ligue came back, first as the Front communiste révolutionnaire for the presidential election of 1974, then as the LCR.
Refusing the frame. In 1973 the Ligue’s defenders refused to argue on the government’s ground. They didn’t spend their time denying violence. They asked why the police had protected a fascist meeting, and why the state had reached for a law that let it treat the two sides as one. Henri Weber, editor of Rouge, reminded Communist Party members in an open letter that the Chamber of Deputies that put Léon Blum in power in 1936 outlawed the Communist Party three years later. Powers taken in the name of order against the right end up being used against the left.
What it means outside France
The same state methods cross borders, and so does the answer. The week Krivine was in jail in 1973, Tariq Ali was arrested outside Buckingham Palace during a protest against Portugal’s dictator Caetano. In 1976 Franco’s political police seized Krivine in Madrid after he spoke at the university, held him for thirty-six hours without charge and deported him. Pablo was tried in Amsterdam for work done for a war France was fighting. A government that treats the left as a security problem doesn’t keep the idea at home, and its friends abroad learn from it.
So the left outside France has two jobs. One is to defend LFI and the NPA now, before any arrests, any dissolutions or any trials. The other is to watch for the same argument in our own countries. In Britain it’s already familiar: organisers held liable for what happens on a march, protest groups proscribed, and a security services framing of “extremism” that pairs the left with the far right.
What we should do now
Defend everyone targeted, whatever our disagreements with them. Many of us have real arguments with Mélenchon and LFI. That’s beside the point. The PCF had spent years denouncing the far left, and in 1973 it still defended Krivine.
Name the false symmetry the first time it’s used. The moment a minister pairs the left with the far right, say what the 1973 appeal said: the government is putting them on the same level to dress up an attack on the left.
Build the campaign abroad early. The pressure in 1961 and 1973 came from committees, petitions, labour-movement signatures and pickets at French embassies and tourist offices. It started before the trials, not after.
Get the labour movement’s names on it. Union general secretaries, MPs and Labour Party bodies should be asked to sign a statement now, as Gollan and Labour MPs signed in 1973.
Keep publishing. A dissolved organisation can come back. In 1969 it came back bigger.
That is why we need to demand:
no criminal case against Philippe Poutou, and an end to the calls for his arrest;
no prosecution of LFI’s elected officials for what they say about the protests, starting with Bally Bagayoko;
no ban on LFI, and no dissolution of any organisation of the workers’ movement;
no new loi anti-casseurs, and no holding protest organisers liable for what others do on a demonstration.
They have tried this before. It failed when the left stood together, and when comrades abroad made it cost the French government something.
Sources. Every item below was proofread against its scan on 20 October 2026, and the corrected text is on the archive site linked.
E.R. Fenwick, “Politics of the International: The French Trotskyists”, The New International, January 1946 (Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line)
Obituary of Pierre Frank, Inprecor (French) 172, 30 April 1984
“The International Campaign to Free Pablo and Santen”, Fourth International 12, Winter 1960–61
“The Amsterdam Trial”, Fourth International 13, Summer 1961
“Street-fighting years: a chronology of an explosive build-up”, International Viewpoint 142, 30 May 1988
Richard Wood, “An Interview with Alain Krivine”, The International 2:6, June 1969
Daniel Elkan, “French repression terror”, The Red Mole 1:4, 1 May 1970
“Ban is concern of labour movement”, Workers Press 1112, 30 June 1973
Dave Bailey, “Lift the ban on French Trotskyists”, Red Weekly 10, 6 July 1973
Red Weekly 12, 20 July 1973: “Racist jibes as Tariq Ali arrested”; the international campaign in defence of the Communist League; “Communist League: Statement from FI”
Henri Weber, “United Front of Workers Must Answer Regime’s Repression” (open letter to Communist Party members from Rouge), Intercontinental Press 1129, 30 July 1973, pp. 923–925 [scan]
United Secretariat of the Fourth International, “Call for International United Front to Defend French Trotskyists”, 10 July 1973, Intercontinental Press 1129, 30 July 1973, pp. 925–927 [scan]
Pierre Frank, “La dissolution de la Ligue communiste et la situation politique en France”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 7–8, May–August 1973 [scan]
“Appel”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 11–12, November–December 1973, p. 42 [scan]
“Vive le Front communiste révolutionnaire !”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 14, April–May 1974
“Krivine arrested in Madrid”, Red Weekly 172, 28 October 1976
Razmig Keucheyan, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Löwy and Ugo Palheta, “France: Revolutionaries inside the Melenchon campaign”, AntiCapitalist Resistance, 18 October 2026 (translated from Contretemps)
Le Monde with AFP, “Blocage des lycées : Bruno Retailleau propose « l’interdiction de LFI »”, 1 October 2026
Audrey Senecal, “« Pourquoi n’êtes-vous pas en prison ? » : Bellamy fustige la complaisance de Poutou envers les pilleurs”, Le Journal du dimanche, 19 October 2026
AFP, “France : Retailleau met en cause les binationaux violents qui pillent”, Le Matin, 19 October 2026
French Interior Ministry figures for 17 October, Trend, 19 October 2026