How to Enact Freedom?

Faced with the erosion of associative freedoms, rethinking freedom as a collective and transgressive practice becomes an urgent democratic necessity.

The French Republic bears three words on the pediments of its public buildings: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. These principles, though always defended in official discourse, nevertheless deserve to be questioned in their effectiveness. I wish to address here the exercise of freedom, which is not, contrary to what one might believe, a solely individual exercise, but also and above all a collective one. Associative freedom constitutes a major expression of this, and it is based on a reading of Jean-Baptiste Jobard’s article published in the journal *Juris associations* (November 2025) that I will develop my own point of view.

Freedom, as I understand it, is eminently collective and deeply political. Due to legislative changes, it can be severely repressed by the power in place. The words displayed on the pediments of public establishments thus find themselves perverted by the legal mechanisms that claim to defend them.

Freedom of Association is not Associative Freedom

Jean-Baptiste Jobard’s article establishes a fundamental distinction between two notions too often confused. “Freedom of association” refers, since the 1901 law, to the right to create an association without prior authorization. “Associative freedoms,” on the other hand, describe the effective possibility of bringing an association to life once it has been created. This distinction is not merely academic: it touches the very heart of our conception of democracy.

These associative freedoms are akin to what Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights consecrates as “the right of everyone to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.” It is not enough to give birth to an association: it must also be allowed to act, to realize its intentions, to grow. This presupposes a series of fundamental rights that are all conditions for the exercise of democracy: the right of assembly, the right to protest, the right to artistic creation, and the right of expression.

This is precisely where the problem lies in France today. Ambroise Croizat described the right of association as a “social conquest,” the fruit of decades of struggles inseparable from the process of building our republican structure. This conquest is today threatened, not in its letter, but in its spirit.

Freedom as Transgression

What seems essential to me today is to envision freedom in its transgressive dimension. Freedom is not a stable state that one possesses once and for all; it is an ethic, a value, a process in perpetual recreation. It implies a permanent questioning of what is established, of what presents itself as self-evident.

bell hooks, in her work Teaching to Transgress (1994), develops this idea with particular force. For her, education—and I would add, any practice of freedom—is an “act of transgression” that allows one to move beyond established boundaries. “When education is the practice of freedom,” she writes, “students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process.” This reciprocity in transgression seems to me constitutive of any authentic practice of freedom.

Regardless of legislative frameworks, the space of freedom always involves a transgressive dimension, a dimension of social risk. This is where one feels, within oneself, whether one is making use of one’s freedom or not. I am not saying that one must transgress absolutely, for the sake of transgressing. But true freedom implies accepting the risk it carries.

The Paradox of Risk

One must, of course, measure the risk. It is not a matter of handing over the stick to be beaten constantly. But—and this is an essential point—when we take the risk, we affirm something. Paradoxically, we hand over the stick less when we risk ourselves than when we do not.

I have observed this on many occasions: when we accept being swept up into the power of others, when we submit by anticipation, we weaken ourselves; we do not exist in the face of the other, and the result is that we are treated increasingly poorly. Preventive submission offers no protection; on the contrary, it invites further domination. We saw this clearly with the submission of the majority of the French cultural sector to the arbitrary and incoherent orders of the State regarding the closure of cultural venues; this acceptance laid the foundations for an extreme fragility that we see at work today.

To be able to take risks, one must know why they are being taken and why one wants to defend freedom. For there are more and more people who think that a life without freedom is perhaps quieter than a life with freedom. This renunciation deserves to be analyzed.

Voluntary Servitude, Yesterday and Today

Étienne de La Boétie, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1576), already posed this troubling question: why do humans accept to serve? “They serve so well,” he wrote, “that to see them one would say not that they have lost their liberty, but won their servitude.” La Boétie shows that tyranny is maintained not by force alone, but by the consent of those who undergo it, by the habit of submission that ends up seeming natural.

This analysis finds a striking relevance in some contemporary societies. China offers a paradigmatic example of a system of generalized self-censorship where, to live peacefully, people choose to live hidden—and even hidden from themselves—to avoid being stigmatized. This internalization of surveillance corresponds precisely to what Michel Foucault analyzed as the “disciplinary society”: power is no longer centralized and locatable; it becomes diffuse and operates in a network in the form of micro-powers that pass through bodies and self-surveillance.

Jobard’s article shows that this logic is at work in France itself, notably through the Republican Engagement Contract (CER) established by the law of August 24, 2021. This contract, which is a contract in name only, as the High Council for Associative Life reminded us, functions less as a legal tool than as an instrument of pressure: it is “very predominantly brandished as a threat sufficient to justify sanctions.” Everyone, feeling watched, becomes a watcher in turn.

Why be free?

But why, fundamentally, want to be free? Freedom is the most precious symbol of the exercise of life itself. It is for this reason that the deprivation of liberty constitutes the punishment inflicted on convicted persons, whether for misdemeanors or crimes. This universality of the sanction says something fundamental: freedom is our most precious asset.

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), established that political freedom is not an attribute of the isolated individual but a quality of the public space, of the “common world” that humans build together. Without this space of appearance where everyone can act and speak, freedom does not truly exist. This is why attacks on associative freedoms are attacks on the very possibility of politics.

Freedom is worth the risk. Not a gratuitous risk, but the assumed risk of one who knows what they defend and why they defend it. This conviction must be argued, documented, and shared; that is the meaning of this article.

The Contemporary Erosion of Associative Freedoms

The law of August 24, 2021, “reinforcing the respect of the principles of the Republic,” marks a profound break with the logic that had prevailed since 1901. Jean-Baptiste Jobard identifies three particularly problematic articles that shift associations from an era of trust to one of defiance:

• Article 1 imposes an obligation of political neutrality, without defining this notion, on organizations contracting with public procurement.
• Article 16 extends the possibilities for administrative dissolution in cases of “violent actions against persons or property,” whereas in criminal law, the notion of violence against property does not exist. Since 2017, thirty-seven dissolutions have been pronounced—as many as since the presidency of General de Gaulle.
• Article 12, finally, establishes the Republican Engagement Contract, whose vague terms (“incite,” “condone,” “disturbance of public order”) open wide margins of interpretation for administrative authorities.

Even before these legal developments, the weakening of associations could be observed in the transformation of their resources: a drop in public funding, the “service-oriented” shift of activities. As Jobard rightly notes, “it is harder to be a protester when you are a service provider.” Attacks on associative freedoms thus extend the process of marketization and instrumentalization of the associative world.

Resisting through Law and Vigilance

“But where danger is, delivers / also that which saves,” wrote Hölderlin. Faced with these threats, associations are learning to fight back on the ground of law itself. They are developing “strategic litigation strategies” and creating jurisprudence. The Federal Union of Intervention for Cultural Structures (UFISC) thus titled one of its meetings: “Fundamental Human Rights: A Zone to Defend!”

This resistance also involves strengthening citizen observatories: Observatory of Associative Freedoms, of creative freedom, of trade union freedoms, of obstacles to the press, of academic freedoms. These watchtowers, most of them recently created, still need to be better linked to constitute a democratic vigilance network.

In a context where authoritarian temptations are prevalent, associative actors in the social movement are integrating a legal grammar into the classical language of struggle. This double competence, both political and legal, seems indispensable to me for effectively defending freedom. Not freedom as a slogan, but freedom as a collective, transgressive, risky practice—that is to say, a living one.

To enact freedom is to accept that freedom is never acquired, that it must always be reclaimed, rethought, reinvented. It is to understand that individual freedom only fully exists in its articulation with the collective, that the private space of the free conscience presupposes the public space of common action. It is, finally, to assume the risk inherent in any authentic practice of freedom, not out of a taste for provocation, but out of a refusal of the voluntary servitude that awaits anyone who renounces exercising their share of sovereignty over common affairs.