What protects citizens, and what organizes their collective deliberation: two terrains, eight decisions, half a century. The Institut Thomas More report examines the repeal of the loi Peyrefitte (1983), the new penal code (1994), the quinquennat (five-year presidential term, 2000), the 2009-2014 loi de programmation militaire (military programming law), the prison law (2009), the limits on cumul des mandats (holding multiple elected offices simultaneously, 2014), the loi Taubira (2014), and the anti-”fake news” law (2018) - on one side justice, security and defense, where the report traces a continuous line from 1983 to 2014; on the other, institutions and public debate, where it documents a recentering of power toward the executive.
Justice, security and defense: a continuous line since 1983
The « sécurité et liberté » (“security and freedom”) law of 2 February 1981 answers a documented diagnosis: as early as 1977, the report Réponses à la violence (“Responses to violence”), submitted to the President of the Republic by a committee chaired by Alain Peyrefitte, denounces a new kind of « violence ordinaire » (“ordinary violence”), where « la règle de droit n’entraîne plus un consensus général » (“the rule of law no longer commands a general consensus”), and the crime rate had risen, according to the Direction centrale de la Police judiciaire (the judicial police directorate) as cited by the report, from 14‰ in 1949 to 40‰ in 1977 - a 2.8-fold increase. As garde des Sceaux (minister of justice), Peyrefitte draws three criminal-justice reforms from this, including tougher pre-trial detention for repeat offenders. Its repeal featured among candidate Mitterrand’s 110 campaign proposals; Badinter carries it through Parliament as early as 1983. The report acknowledges that the grievances against the loi Peyrefitte - institutionalizing what critics called the « délit de sale gueule » (“crime of having the wrong face”), sacrificing adversarial process, constraining judges’ discretion - « ne sont pas sans fondement » (“are not without foundation”), but judges that they produce a shift: « la loi Peyrefitte n’est plus une politique discutable : c’est une faute morale » (“the loi Peyrefitte is no longer a debatable policy: it is a moral fault”). Badinter himself will later admit having gauged « l’incompréhension du public et son hostilité » (“the public’s incomprehension and its hostility”) toward his action. The report sees in it, alongside legal historian Jean-Louis Harouel, the founding act of an « idéologie anti-pénale » (“anti-penal ideology”) that « conteste à la société le droit de punir les criminels mais lui impose l’obligation de les guérir » (“denies society the right to punish criminals while imposing on it the obligation to cure them”); a written question from Senator Catherine Dumas puts the average time to process a criminal case today at 13 months.
Nine years later, the new penal code, enacted on 22 July 1992 and in force from 1 March 1994, extends this movement on a technical level. Under the old 1810 code, every offense carried both a floor and a ceiling; the new code provides that « les textes répressifs ne fixent que le maximum encouru en dessous duquel le juge est libre de descendre sans avoir à motiver sa décision » (“criminal statutes now set only the maximum sentence, below which the judge is free to go without having to justify the decision”), enshrining in Article 132-24 the principle of « individualisation des peines » (“individualization of sentences”) championed by Badinter from 1981 - an earlier draft, in 1978, had been shelved, judged « insuffisamment répressif » (“insufficiently repressive”). Thirty years on, a study by honorary magistrate Dominique-Henri Matagrin for the Institut pour la Justice, covering 98% of offenses sanctioned in 2022, concludes that immediate prison sentences remain a minority outcome across more than 90% of offense categories, and are « ultra-minoritaire » (“an ultra-minority outcome”) - under a fifth of sanctions - in 40% of them.
On 24 November 2009, under a right-wing government, the prison law raises from one to two years the threshold below which a sentence is automatically reviewed for alternatives before imprisonment, and generalizes end-of-sentence electronic monitoring for any convict with four months or less remaining to serve. Presented by garde des Sceaux Rachida Dati, it answers, according to the report, a double constraint - prison overcrowding and the Council of Europe’s 2006 « Règles pénitentiaires européennes » (“European Prison Rules”), which enjoin member states to reduce reliance on incarceration - and its explanatory memorandum states that « la nécessité de limiter autant que possible l’incarcération en lui substituant des mesures de contrôle en milieu ouvert s’applique à tous les détenus » (“the need to limit incarceration as far as possible, replacing it with open-environment monitoring measures, applies to all inmates”). A 2011 circular specifies that « aucun projet préalable d’insertion n’est exigé » (“no prior reintegration plan is required”) for release under electronic tag; the Senate had nonetheless warned: « les mesures d’aménagement ne doivent pas devenir un instrument de gestion des flux de la population carcérale » (“sentence-adjustment measures must not become a tool for managing prison population flow”). The report finds that the stated goal was not met: in June 2025, French prisons held 84,447 inmates for 62,566 places, a 135% occupancy rate, according to the Ministry of Justice.
The loi Taubira of 15 August 2014 continues the same movement. Presented as meant to « punir autrement plutôt que punir davantage » (“punish differently rather than punish more”), it abolishes mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, introduced by the 2007 loi Dati, which had allowed nearly 35,000 minimum sentences to be handed down out of some 94,000 eligible convictions between 2007 and 2011. It creates the contrainte pénale (a non-custodial penal sentence served in the community), and enshrines the « subsidiarité » (“subsidiarity”) of imprisonment: a custodial sentence without suspension « ne peut être prononcée qu’en dernier recours » (“can only be imposed as a last resort”). The 2013 impact study projected 8,000 to 20,000 such measures a year; fewer than 1,500 were actually imposed annually between 2014 and 2019, and the report submitted by Jean-Jacques Urvoas, Taubira’s successor, finds in October 2016 that « de nombreux magistrats n’ont pas perçu la valeur ajoutée » (“many magistrates saw no added value”) in the mechanism, which was abolished in 2019. According to the Institut des politiques publiques (March 2024), the abolished minimum sentences had produced immediate sentences 50% higher for repeat offenders; according to Public Sénat, the number of recorded homicides rose 11% between 2014 and 2016.
On the defense front, the 2009-2014 loi de programmation militaire (LPM, military programming law), adopted on 29 July 2009 following the June 2008 White Paper, makes the ministry the top contributor to the state’s Révision générale des politiques publiques (general review of public policies). Minister Hervé Morin announces as early as October 2008 that « la LPM est une opportunité en période de crise économique » (“the LPM is an opportunity in a time of economic crisis”). Over six years, 54,000 posts are cut - including around 26,000 in the Army, 16,000 in the Air Force and 6,000 in the Navy - or nearly 17% of personnel, figures the report draws by cross-referencing the law itself, a Senate report and a Fondation IFRAP study. Defense spending falls, according to the report, from 3% of GDP in 1990 to 1.5% in 2014, to the point that General Vincent Desportes will speak of a « armée échantillonnaire » (“sample-sized army”). In July 2022, Chief of the Defense Staff Thierry Burkhard acknowledges before the National Assembly that « notre capacité à être une force expéditionnaire ne nous rend pas instantanément capables de conduire une guerre de haute intensité » (“our capacity to be an expeditionary force does not instantly make us capable of conducting a high-intensity war”). The 2024-2030 LPM, funded at €413 billion, attempts to remedy this.
Institutions and public debate: power recentered
On the other side, institutions and public debate: three decisions that redraw where decisions get made and who has the right to contest them.
The quinquennat (five-year presidential term), adopted by referendum on 24 September 2000 - nearly 70% abstention, 73% “yes” - then enacted on 2 October, answers an older idea: as early as 1973, Georges Pompidou had considered the shift from the seven-year to the five-year term, calling himself « hostile à la coïncidence des élections législatives et présidentielles » (“opposed to the coincidence of legislative and presidential elections”) and judging the seven-year term « pas adapté [aux] institutions nouvelles » (“not suited [to] the new institutions”), without ever convening Congress to enact it. In 2000, Jacques Chirac, though himself opposed to the idea, calls on the French to vote in the name of a « meilleure respiration démocratique » (“better democratic breathing room”) and of institutions that were « essoufflées » (“out of breath”). Once the presidential and legislative calendars were aligned from 2002, political scientist Benjamin Morel notes that « les carrières se pensent en fonction de la présidentielle » (“careers are now planned around the presidential race”) and that « l’offre politique se polarise sur l’élection d’un individu » (“political offer polarizes around the election of one individual”). The prime minister, according to the report, loses his role as head of the majority - one recalls Sarkozy calling Fillon a « collaborateur » (“collaborator”) in 2007, adding « le patron, c’est moi » (“I’m the boss”) - and Macron has since appointed seven prime ministers in nine years. The report sees in this a presidentialized regime in which the head of state has lost his constitutional role as arbiter.
The organic law of 14 February 2014 bars a member of Parliament from holding a local executive office alongside their mandate, effective 31 March 2017. Recommended by the Balladur (2009) and Jospin (2012) reports, it had been championed since 1997 by François Hollande, then first secretary of the Socialist Party, who justified full non-cumul (the ban on holding multiple offices simultaneously) by saying he did not see « où est le risque de la déterritorialisation de nos parlementaires » (“where the risk of our MPs’ loss of territorial roots lies”). The report quantifies the shift: in 2014, 82% of MPs and 76% of senators held a local executive office, according to political scientist Thomas Ehrhard; by 2017, about 38% of MPs had to give up that local office, according to Vie publique. It quotes MP Henri Alfandari, for whom the reform « n’a pas comblé le déficit de proximité entre les élus nationaux et leurs électeurs » (“has not closed the proximity gap between national elected officials and their constituents”) and who judges that those officials now « apparaissent comme déconnectés des réalités de terrain » (“appear disconnected from realities on the ground”). The report nonetheless concedes that, before the law was even passed, political scientist Luc Rouban had shown that « l’analyse ne permet pas de conclure au fait que le cumul des mandats entraînerait une moindre activité parlementaire » (“the analysis does not support concluding that holding multiple offices leads to less parliamentary activity”).
The law of 22 December 2018 on combating information manipulation is presented by the report as a « point de bascule » (“tipping point”): it introduces, in the report’s account, for the first time in French law, the possibility of intervening on the circulation of information « en raison de sa fausseté supposée et de ses effets potentiels sur le débat public » (“on account of its supposed falseness and its potential effects on public debate”). The report then documents, step by step, what it presents as the same dynamic: in January 2020, Macron, in his New Year address to the press, raises the need to « définir collectivement le statut de tel ou tel document » (“collectively define the status of this or that document”); the 2020 loi Avia, since struck down by the Conseil constitutionnel, tried to force platforms to rapidly remove content flagged as hateful; at the European level, the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act strengthen platform obligations and oversight of media pluralism. An interministerial order of 26 February 2025 then tasks the Arcom (the French media and digital regulator) with requiring pornography platforms to verify users’ age, potentially through biometric means; a bill banning social media for under-15s is adopted at first reading on 26 January 2026. On 24 February 2026, Minister Jean-Noël Barrot states on France Info that the authorities’ responsibility is « d’empêcher l’internationale réactionnaire de peser dans le débat public » (“to prevent the reactionary international from weighing on public debate”) and « de mettre au pas les réseaux sociaux » (“to bring social media to heel”).
What this installment finds
Two linked trajectories, one gesture: in justice and security, a continuous line since 1983 that has, per the report, made the rights of the accused prevail over victim protection, all the way to what it calls a “culture of excuse”; in the institutions, power recentered toward the executive and public speech under growing regulation. The new penal code touches a judge’s freedom, the anti-”fake news” law one’s freedom to speak - two fundamental freedoms on which the report takes a position that this series does not make its own.
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
