SUMMARY:

In her article Sylvie Thénault explores the introduction and development of the French emergency situations law. The author demonstrates that the immediate context for the emergence of this law was the conflict in Algeria. The colonial context rendered the peculiar status of this law in the French legal system: in most of its stipulations it resembles martial law, except with respect to the rights of civil authorities. The author unpacks the contemporaneous debates for and against the law and traces the history of its application: against the forces of the Algerian independence movement, against the French forces fighting Algeria’s independence, and, more recently, in the context of the disturbances in the Paris suburbs in 2005. The author concludes her legal and historical analysis with the observation that the law was an offspring of both the French colonial empire and the political tradition of the French nation-state shaped by the Revolution.