When the State fails, the citizen steps in

WHY I AM WRITING THIS ARTICLE

I am writing this text on the basis of a precise image: the Facebook post by Le Figaro that I came across on August 21, 2026. It announces that the association AC!! Anti-Corruption filed a complaint after a firebreak initiated by Benoît Bartherotte was cut during the Saumos megafire. I knew absolutely nothing about this man before this episode. Like many French people, I had only glimpsed him in television reports during the fire. So what interests me here is neither his personal history nor the defense of one man: it is the institutional sequence that his case brutally brings to light. [S1][S2][S32]

A first, essential point: as of August 21, 2026, it is not accurate to write that Benoît Bartherotte has been convicted, or that any personal criminal prosecution against him has already been established. The complaint reported on August 19 is a complaint against persons unknown asking for an investigation into possible environmental or forestry offenses and into the conditions under which the work was able to resume. A complaint opens a question; it does not provide the answer. [S1][S2]

The real question of this article is therefore broader and more disturbing: what happens when the State or a local authority is slow, fails or seems unable to carry out a protective mission quickly enough, and a citizen then decides to act himself? The Bartherotte case becomes exemplary not because he should be made into a hero, but because within a few weeks it concentrates the whole paradox: a real emergency, an initiative outside the rules, an authorization obtained after the fact, a complaint, and behind it all a public prevention plan in which the courts had already found years of failure.

1. SAUMOS: A CITIZEN ACTS BEFORE AUTHORIZATION, THEN THE LAW REVISITS THE ACTION

On July 22, 2026, the fire broke out in Saumos. From July 23, as the fire threatened the area and the peninsula’s only road became a key evacuation issue, Benoît Bartherotte had the association he chairs begin felling work intended to create a firebreak line. The work began without prior authorization on land belonging in part to the municipality and to the Office national des forêts (National Forestry Office). It was suspended on July 26 at the town hall’s request, then resumed two days later after discussions with the authorities. On August 19, AC!! filed a complaint against persons unknown so that the conditions of this operation would be examined. [S1][S2]

Benoît Bartherotte openly acknowledges the lack of initial authorization and says he acted in the face of the emergency, "in substitution for the failure of the public authorities." That phrase is his own; it is not in itself a court ruling. But the contrast in timing is already striking: the citizen decides in a few hours, the administration must coordinate a gigantic crisis, and then the institutions come back to examine the legality of what was done. [S1]

2. WHAT MAKES THE CASE EXEMPLARY IS NOT THE MAN, IT IS THE SEQUENCE

It would be intellectually lazy to turn Benoît Bartherotte into an irreproachable hero. In August 2026, Le Monde recalled that he is a long-standing, controversial local figure, no stranger to legal battles; local opponents believe he is also acting to protect his own interests. [S36] AC!!, for its part, maintains that he disregarded the rules and that the work was not coordinated in advance. [S1] This file does not settle these controversies, nor does it give them more weight than they have.

What makes the case far more important than its protagonist is the sequence of events. On July 23, a private initiative began without authorization. On July 27, the authorities cut another, much larger firebreak further north as part of a public system of tactical clearings. On July 28, the Bartherotte work was allowed to resume after discussions with the authorities. Three weeks later, the courts received a complaint against persons unknown. [S1][S5][S6]

As early as July 28, Le Figaro had summed up the conflict with a headline giving Bartherotte a voice: "When the fire was advancing, there was nobody left." The post that triggered this file, on August 21, then asked another question: "If everyone does what he did, where are we headed?" [S32][S33] These two formulations frame the problem exactly: a Republic cannot accept that everyone decides alone what should be cut, closed, watched or defended; but nor can it allow situations to arise in which citizens conclude that waiting for the authorities amounts to accepting the damage.

3. PUBLIC REACTIONS ARE THEMSELVES A SYMPTOM OF DISTRUST

The comments visible under the Le Figaro Facebook post that led me to write this article are overwhelmingly favorable to the initiative in the screenshot consulted: several users speak of support, of homes or hectares saved, and criticize the idea that an action carried out during the emergency could later lead to a complaint. [S32] The methodological limit must be stated immediately: a few Facebook comments are neither an opinion poll nor a representative sample of the French population.

On Reddit, by contrast, the tone is much more critical. Users stress the public ownership of the land, the risk of special treatment, the connections Benoît Bartherotte said he used to obtain authorization after the fact, or the idea that an ordinary citizen might not have received the same hearing. Others, after discovering the delay in the fire prevention plan, themselves shift the debate toward public failure and the question of whether substitution is legitimate. [S34][S35]

These opposing reactions prove nothing about guilt, the exact effectiveness of the firebreak or the intentions of the person concerned. They do, however, reveal an extremely instructive rift in trust. One camp sees a State that arrives after the action to check up on the person who took the initiative; the other sees a State capable of bending procedure when an influential man acts without authorization. In both narratives, public authority comes out weakened. It is precisely this loss of trust, and the behaviors it gives rise to, that is the subject of this file.

4. THE MOST DAMNING FACT PREDATES THE FIRE: A PLAN ORDERED IN 2004, STILL UNFINISHED IN 2026

The file changes in nature when one opens the judgment of the Bordeaux Administrative Court of May 4, 2023. By an order of October 1, 2004, the prefect of Gironde had ordered the drawing up of a Forest Fire Risk Prevention Plan, or PPRIF, for Lège-Cap-Ferret. At the time of the dispute, more than sixteen years had passed and the court found that the plan was not simply late: its preparation "had not even begun." [S3]

The judgment goes further: it rejects the arguments put forward to justify the delay and explicitly targets the prefect’s "failure" to implement his own order. It recalls that as early as 2004 the municipality had been described as particularly exposed to the outbreak and spread of fires likely to affect people, property and the environment, and orders the prefect to launch the procedure within six months. [S3]

And the problem does not stop in 2023. In December 2025, the Gironde prefecture still stated that several ordered PPRIFs, including the one for Lège-Cap-Ferret, were part of preparation procedures "on hold." In 2026, the municipality still presents the PPRIF ordered on October 1, 2004 as a "document being drawn up." [S22][S37] This does not mean that the area had no prevention or operational system at all; it means something much more precise and indisputable: a regulatory prevention tool deemed necessary in 2004 had still not been completed more than twenty years later.

The contrast on which this article rests fits into one chronology: a public prevention plan ordered in 2004, a failure of more than sixteen years found by a judge in 2023, a document still being drawn up in 2026 — and then, during the emergency, a citizen who decides within a few hours to have a break cut through the forest.

5. THE STATE WAS NOT ABSENT: THAT IS PRECISELY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INACTION, DELAY AND SATURATION

Credibility requires not tipping into the opposite caricature. During the Saumos megafire, the State, firefighters, the security forces, the army, the DFCI (forest fire protection services), the ONF, local authorities, farmers and private individuals deployed considerable resources. On July 26, the prefecture said that nearly 220,000 people had been evacuated as a precaution in 23 municipalities. It counted, among other things, 105 forestry machines, 55 harvester heads, 15 bulldozers, 30 forwarders and more than 20 brush cutters. [S5]

On July 29, the prefecture announced 130 kilometers of tactical clearings carried out with military and forestry resources, the DFCI, the ONF and the support of farmers, followed by the securing of 240 kilometers of forest edges. The prefect explicitly thanked the firefighters, the security forces and the armed forces, but also associations, farmers, businesses and private individuals. [S6]

This mobilization rules out any caricature: the State and the emergency services did not "abandon" Gironde. But it sheds better light on the subject. A public authority can be extremely present during a disaster while having been too slow on prevention, too fragile in certain capabilities or temporarily overwhelmed by the speed of an exceptional event. The inefficiency that drives citizens to step in is therefore not always absence: it can be the gap between the time of risk, administrative time and the time of emergency.

6. "IF EVERYONE DOES WHAT HE DID, WHERE ARE WE HEADED?": THE RIGHT QUESTION NEEDS ITS MIRROR QUESTION

The headline visible in Le Figaro’s post asks a formidable question: "If everyone does what he did, where are we headed?" It deserves an answer without romanticism. If everyone fells trees, blocks a road, organizes a patrol or decides alone on an emergency measure, public authority dissolves. Ordinary law exists to prevent fear, however sincere, from becoming an individual license to act on other people’s property or on public space.

But the symmetrical question must be asked with equal force: if no one dares do anything any more when an immediate danger exceeds the capabilities or the speed of public authority, where are we headed? A Republic cannot ask citizens to be both totally passive in the face of an emergency and infinitely patient in the face of administrative delays that the courts themselves have described as a failure.

The challenge, then, is not to establish a general right to unregulated action. It is to build a framework in which emergency citizen engagement can be prepared, pre-authorized, coordinated and traceable. The right response to individual initiative is neither absolute laissez-faire nor reflexive criminalization: it is organization in advance.

7. PROTECTING PEOPLE AND PROPERTY IS AN EXPLICIT MISSION OF THE STATE, NOT A MERE PROMISE

The Internal Security Code is remarkably clear. Its Article L111-1 states that security is a fundamental right and that the State has a duty to ensure it throughout the territory, in particular by maintaining public peace and order and protecting people and property. [S7]

This sentence makes it politically impossible to answer citizens by saying: "protect yourselves." Private protection can complement public action; it cannot become the entry ticket to a fundamental right. When households that can afford it buy gates, cameras, guards or patrols while others remain dependent on an overstretched public service, it is no longer just a security market: it is inequality of protection before the Republic.

The law goes even further for certain damage caused by collective violence. Article L211-10 of the same code provides for the State’s civil liability for damage resulting from crimes and offenses committed openly by force or by violence by mobs or gatherings, under the conditions defined by case law. This does not mean that every burned car automatically gives rise to compensation by the State, but the legal principle shows that protecting public order is not merely a moral abstraction. [S8]

8. RIOTS: WHEN PUBLIC PROTECTION ARRIVES TOO LATE FOR THE PROPERTY THAT IS BURNING

The riots of summer 2023 make it possible to measure what a breakdown, even a temporary one, in ordinary protection means in practice. The Senate report published in 2024 counts 672 municipalities affected in 95 départements, an estimated 50,000 rioters and 45,000 members of the security forces mobilized. It records 12,031 vehicles burned, 2,508 buildings burned or damaged, more than a thousand shops vandalized or looted and nearly a billion euros of damage to property. [S9]

The 45,000 police officers and gendarmes mobilized must also be remembered: no one can seriously write that the State abandoned the field without a fight. But for the owner whose car goes up in smoke at the foot of their building, the national mobilization does not erase the individual failure of protection. A destroyed car can mean an impossible commute to work, a child who can no longer be driven, a tradesman deprived of a work tool or a household condemned to an unexpected expense. The Senate report contains no consolidated statistic on the number of employees prevented from working the next day; I therefore refuse to invent one. But the practical consequences of losing a vehicle are not extravagant speculation.

The paradox is brutal: when public order gives way for a few hours, citizens discover that the fundamental right to security has a time dimension. Being compensated months later is not the same thing as being protected on the night the property burns.

9. WHEN RESIDENTS PATROL THEMSELVES: SUBSTITUTION IS NO LONGER A HYPOTHESIS

In Brignoles, in the Var, TF1 documented a particularly revealing initiative in January 2024. After about ten burglaries in less than a month in the Le Pin neighborhood, some twenty residents had organized their own patrols every evening. Some used thermal binoculars; others patrolled by car. Their stated instruction was to call the gendarmerie or the municipal police if they spotted anything. The mayor opposed it, fearing things would get out of hand. [S10]

This case obviously does not allow us to claim that "the French are patrolling everywhere in place of the police." It establishes something more precise: after repeated offenses, some citizens may decide to devote their own time to a security presence they consider insufficient. This mechanism is not isolated.

In Colmar, in December 2024, residents of the Croix-Blanche neighborhood also organized day and night patrols after a resurgence of burglaries, to "make their presence felt." [S38] In Tournefeuille, in July 2025, after a new series of attempts, residents interviewed by La Dépêche mentioned cameras, surveillance among neighbors and even, for some, the idea of "setting up a militia" or patrolling in the evening — an idea reported as an angry reaction, not as an established legal arrangement. [S39]

In Fenouillet, in August 2025, residents of a housing complex took turns patrolling by day or night after several burglaries, while the municipal police and the gendarmerie stepped up their own patrols at the same time. [S40] This last example is particularly enlightening: citizen self-protection does not necessarily appear because the State does absolutely nothing; it can appear because residents consider that public action, even if real, is no longer enough to reassure them or to prevent offenses from recurring.

The State itself created the official "citizen participation" scheme, but the National Gendarmerie sets a very clear limit to it: citizen contacts do not carry out rounds or patrols, have no public-authority powers and must report incidents to the security forces. [S11]

That is precisely the boundary of this article. In a State governed by the rule of law that fully carries out its mission, citizens can observe, prevent, alert and help; they should not feel that they must themselves become the deterrent presence. When residents begin to organize their nights around watching their neighborhood, the consequence of perceived inefficiency is no longer abstract: it directly changes civil life.

10. WHEN PEOPLE PAY FOR PRIVATE SECURITY TO RECOVER THE PEACE OF MIND THEY EXPECTED FROM THE PUBLIC SERVICE

In Toulouse, a TF1 report broadcast in June 2025 shows another form of relay: landlords and co-ownership associations calling on private security companies. The service described by TF1 was then operating in some fifty residential complexes. The guards patrolled lobbies, walkways and cellars and intervened at residents’ request. In one of the examples filmed, the co-owners financed the service directly. [S12]

This is no longer a case of residents improvising a patrol, but of a regulated profession. The 2025 annual report of the Conseil national des activités privées de sécurité (National Council for Private Security Activities), the CNAPS, mentions around 300,000 agents and 12,500 private security companies, whose growing role alongside the public forces it highlights. This figure refers to the authorized and regulated ecosystem; it should not be read as 300,000 guards on patrol at the same time. [S13]

The existence of a private security sector is not a democratic anomaly. Businesses, stadiums, shops, sensitive sites and residential complexes will always need additional services. The anomaly begins when a household feels that paying for private security is no longer a comfort, but the necessary condition for recovering, at home, the peace of mind it thought it was already financing collectively.

When security becomes a subscription, the fundamental right risks turning into a premium service.

11. WHEN THE HOUSING ESTATE CLOSES ITS GATES: THE PRIVATE BOUNDARY AS A RESPONSE TO PROTECTION DEEMED INSUFFICIENT

Residential fragmentation gives the phenomenon an almost political materiality. In Marseille, academic research counted, as early as 2013, more than 1,531 gated residential complexes occupying about 13% of the urbanized area. [S14] A TF1 report in 2022 mentioned 1,609 gated complexes and described the proliferation of fences, barriers, walls, gates, door codes and cameras in very different neighborhoods. [S15]

In December 2024, TF1 reported that the number was approaching 1,900 private or gated residences, compared with about a hundred in the 1990s, and showed the urban consequences of these enclosures: detours, breaks in pedestrian routes and the gradual privatization of streets or spaces once open to passers-by. [S16] The figures from the different sources are not strictly comparable because definitions and dates change, but the long-term trend is abundantly documented.

The wall is not always the consequence of a policing failure. It also responds to parking, peace and quiet, property values or the private status of the roads. But when the safety of people and property becomes a central argument for gating, the city symbolically turns into an archipelago: those behind the gate have a boundary; those who remain outside depend on the common territory.

A Republic built on equality cannot regard this development as a mere real-estate detail. The private boundary is sometimes perfectly legal; it nonetheless tells of a demand for protective separation. By multiplying airlocks, door codes, guards and gates, one ends up producing a geography of trust: here, I protect myself; beyond, I no longer believe enough in common protection.

12. MUTUAL AID AMONG CITIZENS IS LEGITIMATE; PERMANENT SUBSTITUTION SHOULD NOT BECOME SO

The "State versus citizens" narrative would, moreover, be historically false. French civil protection rests structurally on voluntary commitment. As of December 31, 2025, the statistics of the fire and rescue services counted 258,641 firefighters, of whom 200,961 were volunteers, or about 77.7%. The calculation is simple: 200,961 ÷ 258,641 × 100 ≈ 77.7%. [S17]

In other words, nearly four out of five firefighters are citizens who have chosen to serve in addition to their main occupation or their personal life. The State and local authorities therefore do not regard the committed citizen as an anomaly: they have built a large part of the emergency-services model on them.

The law also provides for municipal civil protection reserves. The official guide recalls that a municipality can set up a team of volunteers to support the services when an event exceeds their usual resources, under the authority of the mayor. [S18] And during the Saumos fire, the prefecture itself praised the mobilization of farmers, while reminding them that their initiatives had to be coordinated. [S5]

That is the key to the Bartherotte debate: the problem is not citizen engagement. The French civil protection model already relies massively on volunteers and organized reserves. The problem arises when prepared engagement under command gives way to autonomous initiative because citizens believe that the authorities are not deciding quickly enough. An effective democracy must therefore integrate the available people, equipment and skills in advance, so that citizens’ energy complements public authority instead of being forced to bypass it.

13. CANADAIRS: THE CAPABILITY WEAKNESS WAS DOCUMENTED BEFORE THE MEGAFIRE

On air resources, criticism can be extremely severe without inventing a single fact. The Senate wrote, about the 2024 season, that at certain critical periods only three of twelve Canadairs were operational, or 25% of the fleet: 3 ÷ 12 × 100 = 25%. The rapporteur spoke of "worrying shortcomings" and of a risk of capability breakdown if fires multiplied simultaneously. [S19]

The same debate continued in 2025. A Senate committee found that in July 2025 the insufficient number of available water-bombing aircraft had forced choices between requests for deployment in the Aude and in the Bouches-du-Rhône, concluding that the risk of capability breakdown had actually materialized. [S20]

The State has nevertheless invested: the Ministry of the Interior points to major commitments since 2022 and on June 4, 2026 signed the order for two additional Canadairs for nearly 200 million euros, with deliveries announced for 2032 or 2033; two other aircraft ordered in 2024 are expected in 2028. [S21] The relevant subject for this article is therefore not to invent a budget allocation to some other policy: it is to note that a capability deemed critical had been flagged as fragile several years before a major crisis, and that strengthening it materially still requires several years.

The chronology is enough: the Senate had documented periods when only three of twelve Canadairs were operational and a risk of capability breakdown; in 2025, a Senate committee found that the shortage of available aircraft had forced choices between several deployment requests; the new aircraft will only be delivered gradually. [S19][S20][S21][S24][S25] When public capability is too weak at the critical moment, the consequence is mechanical: one must prioritize, wait, mobilize other resources and accept that some local players will look for protection solutions themselves.

14. ACTING TO SAVE PROPERTY: THE STATE OF NECESSITY EXISTS, BUT IT DOES NOT TURN AN EMERGENCY INTO A GENERAL LICENSE

French criminal law has a notion that naturally comes to mind in the face of a disaster: the state of necessity. Article 122-7 of the Penal Code provides that a person is not criminally liable when, faced with a present or imminent danger threatening himself, another person or property, he performs an act necessary to safeguard the person or the property, unless there is a disproportion between the means used and the seriousness of the threat. [S23]

It would be legally reckless to conclude that this article will necessarily exonerate Benoît Bartherotte. It is for the courts, should any prosecution take place, to assess the danger, the necessity, the proportionality, the nature of the land, the forestry and environmental rules and the whole context. This file has neither the criminal case file nor the competence of a court to settle that question.

But the mere fact that the law recognizes the state of necessity is a reminder of something obvious: our legal order knows that an extreme situation can force someone to perform an act that, outside danger, would be prohibited. The real democratic difficulty lies in knowing where to place the boundary between necessary emergency action and dangerous initiative. That boundary cannot be drawn by Facebook, nor by the reflex "he saved houses so he is right," nor by the opposite reflex "he did not have authorization so the debate is closed."

15. THE NATIONAL CONSEQUENCE: PROTECTION THAT IS BECOMING MORE AND MORE PRIVATE, TERRITORIAL AND UNEQUAL

Taken separately, each of the examples in this file can be given a particular explanation. What matters is their common mechanism: when a public mission seems too slow or insufficient, those who can create additional protection. The owner has trees cut, the neighbor patrols, the co-ownership pays a guard, the housing estate closes its gate, the company buys its own security resources.

The consequence is not only budgetary. It transforms the nature of the relationship with the State: security ceases to be experienced solely as a common guarantee and also becomes an individual capacity to have money, a network of neighbors, an association, machinery, cameras or a private contractor.

Those who have these resources increase their resilience; those who do not remain dependent on the common level. This is how public inefficiency, even partial and localized, can produce an additional inequality: not only between more or less exposed territories, but between citizens able or unable to buy, organize or improvise their own protection.

The political danger is then simple: the more citizens get used to solving sovereign problems on their own, the less exceptional private intervention seems to them. What was one-off help can become a social norm: "since no one will come quickly enough, let’s organize ourselves." It is this normalization of substitution, and not mutual aid itself, that weakens the republican contract.

16. FORTUNATELY, FRANCE HAS NOT REACHED THE STAGE OF BORDER PATROLS: BUT THE WARNING EXISTS

An article attacking public failure would become irresponsible if it glorified a militia or private justice. A citizen patrol does not have police powers, a security guard is not a gendarme and an owner does not have a general right to destroy other people’s property in the name of a risk he alone assesses. The official documents on citizen participation and the instructions given during Saumos insist precisely on coordination. [S5][S11]

Fortunately, France has not reached the stage observed in Poland in 2025, where "citizen patrol" groups from the Border Defence Movement set up near the German border claiming to monitor migrant crossings; the Polish government recalled that the border is the responsibility of the official services and that there was no need for paramilitary formations. [S41] This comparison is neither an equivalence nor a prophecy: it simply recalls how far the logic of "we will do it ourselves" can go when trust in public action deteriorates.

Public authority loses twice when it fails: first because it does not protect enough or quickly enough; then because it must prevent citizens who have lost trust from permanently taking its place.

17. AFTER THE EMERGENCY, THE LAW CATCHES UP WITH THE CITIZEN: ACCOUNTABILITY MUST BE SYMMETRICAL

A citizen who acts outside the rules may legitimately have to answer for it. Forestry, environmental, property or police rules do not disappear because of good intentions. But public authority must accept the same logic for itself. When a judge finds a failure of more than sixteen years in the implementation of a prevention order, that fact must carry as much political weight as the irregularity committed in the emergency. [S3]

Symmetry should become a simple democratic rule: every investigation into a citizen’s action during a crisis should be accompanied, where the facts justify it, by a public lessons-learned review of the administration’s preparedness. Which plans were ready? Which deadlines were missed? What equipment was lacking? Who made the decisions? What warnings had been given by the Cour des comptes, the Senate, the inspectorates or the courts?

The courts must be able to investigate the Saumos firebreak freely. But the Republic cannot stop at the felled tree. It must look with the same rigor at the plan ordered in 2004, the failure found in 2023, the still-unfinished state of the PPRIF in 2026, the air capabilities flagged as fragile and the way in which authorization for the work was finally given. [S1][S3][S19][S22][S37] Otherwise, the law risks being experienced as a very fast machine for reminding citizens of their obligations and a much slower one for forcing public authority to correct its own delays.

18. WHEN JUSTICE IS TOO SLOW, SUBSTITUTION CAN CHANGE IN NATURE

Security does not end when the police arrest a suspect. It continues in the investigation, the trial, the enforcement of decisions and the ability of litigants to obtain an answer within a time frame compatible with the reality of their lives. On this ground, the official figures are severe enough that there is no need to dramatize them: in the Ministry of Justice survey covering 2024, only 49% of respondents say they trust the justice system; 86% consider it too slow, 78% hard to understand and 69% believe it does not treat citizens equally. [S26]

These data do not allow us to write that "the justice system no longer works." They do, however, show a major crisis of perception. An institution can hand down thousands of decisions every day and still lose part of its symbolic capacity if a majority of citizens think it acts too slowly or unequally. Yet justice has a particular feature: it is not only a public service, it is also the legitimate path by which a society forbids anyone from becoming their own judge.

The law itself recognizes that the functioning of the justice system can engage the State’s liability. Article L141-1 of the Code of Judicial Organization provides that the State must make good the damage caused by the defective functioning of the public justice service, even though this liability is subject to strict conditions, in particular gross negligence or denial of justice. [S27] The European Convention on Human Rights also guarantees, in its Article 6, the right to have one’s case heard within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal. [S28]

The question must be asked without excusing any violence: what happens when enough citizens become convinced that the police will not arrive in time, that proceedings will last for years or that the judicial response will come too late to be of use in their real lives? The risk is not only distrust; it is that some will move from self-protection to the idea that they should also investigate, detain, punish or settle the conflict themselves. That shift is never a right: it is precisely one of the consequences that a State governed by the rule of law must prevent by remaining credible and fast enough.

A decision handed down late is still a court decision, but slowness can leave a void felt by the people concerned for months or years. That is why judicial efficiency is not a peripheral administrative issue: it contributes directly to the State’s ability to convince citizens not to take the law into their own hands.

19. THE LEGAL RED LINE: HELPING, DEFENDING ONESELF OR APPREHENDING IS NOT REPLACING THE POLICE AND THE JUDGE

French law does not condemn citizens to absolute passivity. Article 73 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows, in the specific case of a flagrant crime or a flagrant offense punishable by imprisonment, the perpetrator to be apprehended and taken before the nearest judicial police officer. [S29] Article 122-5 recognizes self-defense under strict conditions of necessity, simultaneity and proportionality. [S30] Article 223-6 even requires, in certain circumstances, that assistance be given to a person in danger. [S31]

This architecture states exactly what a Republic must preserve: citizens can rescue, defend themselves, defend others and intervene in certain flagrant situations; they cannot single-handedly become police officer, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executor of the sentence. The rule of law accepts assistance. Through its inefficiency, it must avoid creating the temptation of substitution.

This is also why the patrols documented in Brignoles, Colmar and Fenouillet must be taken seriously without being turned into a model: they show citizens who want to reintroduce a deterrent presence, but the only lasting response compatible with the rule of law remains a public authority credible enough for this private presence to remain an exceptional complement, not a permanent necessity. [S10][S38][S40]

20. WHAT THE STATE MUST PREVENT: THE CITIZEN EXCEPTION BECOMING THE RULE

The answer is neither an all-powerful State nor citizens left to fend for themselves. It consists in reducing the situations in which an emergency forces someone to choose between waiting, suffering or acting outside the rules. A few priorities emerge directly from the examples studied.

• Carry out prevention plans and court injunctions concerning major risks within publicly traceable time frames, so that a delay of several years is not discovered only at the moment of disaster.
• Publish the critical capabilities actually available — operational aircraft, vehicles, staff and reinforcement times — in order to distinguish the theoretical fleet from the capability that can actually be used on the day the crisis strikes.
• Prepare protocols in advance for mobilizing farmers, businesses, associations and citizen reserves under a clear chain of command, with areas of action, insurance and responsibilities defined before the danger.
• Create genuinely fast emergency authorization mechanisms for certain safeguarding works, without a blank check: identified danger, proportionality, coordination, traceability and after-the-fact review.
• Guarantee a level of local security credible enough for neighborhood patrols, guards or private arrangements to remain chosen complements and not responses regarded as indispensable.
• Make a public lessons-learned review systematic after every major crisis: what was lacking, the delays, the trade-offs, the decisions, the unavailable equipment and the corrections actually funded.
• Apply to public authority the same culture of accountability as to the citizen: if the act carried out outside the rules during the emergency is examined, examine with the same precision the delays, failures or insufficient capabilities that preceded that emergency.
• Measure and reduce court delays when their length weakens the peacemaking function of justice, so that self-protection never drifts toward the temptation of handing down a decision or a punishment oneself.

21. CONCLUSION: THE BARTHEROTTE CASE IS THE STARTING POINT, NOT A DIGRESSION

When the State fails, the citizen steps in. The real challenge is to allow citizens to help without becoming the State, to act without becoming outlaws, to obtain justice without being tempted to dispense it themselves, and to be protected without having to build their own boundary.

I started from a Le Figaro post and a man I did not know. The more I checked this case, the less Benoît Bartherotte’s personality seemed to me to be the real subject. The subject is the mechanism: a danger approaches, a citizen considers that action is needed, he acts before authorization, the authorities suspend the work, then authorize it to resume, and a few weeks later a complaint asks the courts to examine what happened. [S1][S2][S32]

This mechanism becomes far weightier when set alongside a legally established fact: the Lège-Cap-Ferret PPRIF had been ordered in 2004; in 2023, the administrative court found that after more than sixteen years its preparation had not even begun and pointed to the prefect’s failure; in 2025, the prefecture still listed this procedure among those on hold; in 2026, the municipality still presents it as being drawn up. [S3][S22][S37]

It would be wrong to conclude that the State did nothing during the megafire. The resources mobilized were enormous, and this must be acknowledged so as not to insult the personnel involved. But public effectiveness is not measured only by the number of machines mobilized when everything is burning. It is also measured by the capacity to have prepared, equipped, planned and decided before citizens find themselves facing the choice: wait, or do it themselves. [S5][S6]

That is exactly what the other cases gathered here tell, to varying degrees. During the 2023 riots, thousands of vehicles burned despite the massive mobilization of the security forces. In several municipalities, residents faced with repeated burglaries organized their own patrols. Elsewhere, residential complexes pay guards or close off their access. These are not identical phenomena; they have one thing in common: when common protection seems insufficient, citizens create additional protection. [S9][S10][S12][S14][S38][S40]

That is where the red line lies. In a State governed by the rule of law that is fully respected and effective enough, citizens must be able to help, alert, rescue and take part. They should not have to become the patrol of their street, the squad of their residential complex, the decision-maker for emergency works or, tomorrow, the judge of their own conflict because they no longer believe the institution will intervene in time.

Fortunately, France has not reached the citizen border patrols observed in Poland. [S41] But it would be absurd to wait until that stage has been reached before looking at the more ordinary signals: neighbors keeping watch at night, walls closing off, guards being paid, private individuals making emergency decisions that public authority has not yet taken.

When the State fails, the citizen steps in. The danger is not that citizens are brave, show solidarity or are capable of initiative. The danger begins when this stepping in ceases to be exceptional because they no longer really expect the State to carry out the mission in time.

A State governed by the rule of law does not hold together only because it has laws capable of punishing whoever acts outside the rules. It holds together because its citizens still have enough confidence in its ability to protect, prevent, decide and judge to accept not taking its place. It is this confidence that every prolonged failure, every insufficient capability and every response that comes too late erodes.

The Bartherotte case does not by itself prove a general failure of the French State. It does something more useful: it makes visible, almost in its pure state, the moment when public inefficiency or delay meets private initiative and no one quite knows any more who was supposed to act, when, with what authorization and under whose responsibility.

It is this moment that a serious Republic must prevent. Because after the citizen who helps comes the citizen who replaces. And when a society gets used to replacing the State mission after mission, it is no longer only administrative effectiveness that deteriorates: it is the very boundary between public authority and self-protection that begins to fade.

The real challenge, then, is to allow citizens to help without having to become the State, to protect themselves without having to organize their own police, and to act in an emergency without the emergency having become the permanent excuse of a system that failed to do in time what it had itself planned to do.

APPENDIX A — WHAT THIS FILE CLAIMS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT CLAIM

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

Priority was given to official texts, courts, parliamentary reports, public statistics and identified journalistic sources. Social-media reactions are used solely to document the polarization of the debate and are explicitly flagged as unrepresentative. Local examples demonstrate the existence of a mechanism, never its national frequency. Consulted and checked: August 21, 2026.

1. [S1] AFP / Boursorama, "Megafire in Gironde: an anti-corruption association files a complaint after a firebreak is cut at Cap-Ferret," August 19, 2026. View the source ↗
2. [S2] Anadolu, "Gironde: complaint by the anti-corruption association AC!! after a firebreak is created without authorization at Cap-Ferret," August 20, 2026. View the source ↗
3. [S3] Bordeaux Administrative Court, May 4, 2023, No. 2102879: Lège-Cap-Ferret PPRIF, failure of more than sixteen years and injunction. Text from the administrative courts’ open data. View the source ↗
4. [S4] Géorisques, Lège-Cap-Ferret municipal report: PPRIF ordered on October 1, 2004. View the source ↗
5. [S5] Gironde prefecture, "Saumos fire: situation update at 10 p.m. this Sunday, July 26," July 26, 2026. View the source ↗
6. [S6] Gironde prefecture, "Saumos fire: situation update at 11 p.m. this Wednesday, July 29," July 29, 2026. View the source ↗
7. [S7] Internal Security Code, Article L111-1: fundamental right to security and the State’s duty to protect people and property. View the source ↗
8. [S8] Internal Security Code, Article L211-10: civil liability of the State for certain damage committed by violent mobs or gatherings. View the source ↗
9. [S9] Senate, "June 2023 riots: understanding, assessing, responding," information report No. 521, 2024. View the source ↗
10. [S10] TF1 Info, "Rise in burglaries: residents of this Var municipality decide to patrol themselves," Brignoles, January 8, 2024. View the source ↗
11. [S11] National Gendarmerie, "Citizen participation": citizen contacts do not carry out rounds or patrols, have no public-authority powers and report incidents to the security forces. View the source ↗
12. [S12] TF1 Info, "Very reassuring: in Toulouse, these guards called in by landlords keep residents’ peace of mind," June 17, 2025. View the source ↗
13. [S13] CNAPS, 2025 Annual Report: around 300,000 agents and 12,500 private security companies. View the source ↗
14. [S14] LPED / research on fragmentation in Marseille: more than 1,531 gated residential complexes in 2013, about 13% of the urbanized area. View the source ↗
15. [S15] TF1 Info, "Marseille, capital of secured residences," June 23, 2022. View the source ↗
16. [S16] TF1 Info, "Why are there so many private roads in Marseille?," December 5, 2024. View the source ↗
17. [S17] DGSCGC / ENSOSP, Statistics of the fire and rescue services, 2026 edition: 258,641 firefighters, including 200,961 volunteers as of December 31, 2025. View the source ↗
18. [S18] Directorate General for Civil Protection and Crisis Management, PCS/PICS guide: municipal civil protection reserve and volunteers under the authority of the mayor. View the source ↗
19. [S19] Senate, 2025 Finance Bill, "Civil protection": at certain critical periods in 2024, 3 of 12 Canadairs operational; risk of capability breakdown. View the source ↗
20. [S20] Senate, 2026 Finance Bill, "Civil protection": choices between requests for air deployment in July 2025, risk of capability breakdown materialized. View the source ↗
21. [S21] Ministry of the Interior, "Forest fires: better prevention, better firefighting, better rebuilding," June 5, 2026: two new Canadairs, nearly €200m, investments since 2022. View the source ↗
22. [S22] Gironde prefecture, "Preparation of various Forest Fire Risk Prevention Plans," update of December 2, 2025: several procedures are shown as on hold, including Lège-Cap-Ferret. View the source ↗
23. [S23] Penal Code, Article 122-7: state of necessity, present or imminent danger, necessity and proportionality. View the source ↗
24. [S24] Senate, 2023 budget review of the water-bombing aircraft fleet: aging, maintenance and lack of visibility on renewal. View the source ↗
25. [S25] Senate, 2024 Finance Bill, "Civil protection": average age of the Canadairs, maintenance and announced cost of renewal. View the source ↗
26. [S26] Ministry of Justice, Infostat Justice No. 204, October 2025, "Justice in France in 2024: perceptions, knowledge and judicial experiences": 49% trust, 86% find justice too slow, 78% hard to understand, 69% unequal. View the source ↗
27. [S27] Code of Judicial Organization, Article L141-1: State liability for the defective functioning of the public justice service, under conditions. View the source ↗
28. [S28] European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6: right to a fair trial and to a hearing within a reasonable time. View the source ↗
29. [S29] Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 73: apprehension by any person of the perpetrator of a flagrant crime or offense punishable by imprisonment, in order to take them before the judicial police officer. View the source ↗
30. [S30] Penal Code, Article 122-5: self-defense of persons and property under conditions of necessity and proportionality. View the source ↗
31. [S31] Penal Code, Article 223-6: obligation, under conditions, to immediately prevent certain offenses or to assist a person in danger. View the source ↗
32. [S32] Le Figaro Facebook post visible in the screenshot that prompted this article, consulted on August 21, 2026: announcement of the AC!! complaint and headline "If everyone does what he did, where are we headed?". Source used as an editorial trigger and for qualitative analysis of reactions, not as proof of the facts.
33. [S33] Le Figaro, July 28, 2026, "When the fire was advancing, there was nobody left: at Cap Ferret, Benoît Bartherotte defends his firebreak created without authorization." View the source ↗
34. [S34] Reddit / r/france, thread of August 20, 2026 on the AC!! complaint: critical reactions and debate on legality, the connections of the person concerned, the state of necessity and the PPRIF failure. Unrepresentative opinion source. View the source ↗
35. [S35] Reddit / r/france, thread of August 11, 2026 on the mayor’s intention to take legal action against Benoît Bartherotte: reactions on public ownership, alleged special treatment and after-the-fact authorization. Unrepresentative opinion source. View the source ↗
36. [S36] Le Monde, "At Cap-Ferret, Benoît Bartherotte, master of his kingdom," August 7, 2026: profile documenting his long local history, his legal disputes and criticism of his initiatives. Used to avoid any hagiographic presentation. View the source ↗
37. [S37] Municipality of Lège-Cap-Ferret, Urban Planning section: PPRIF ordered on October 1, 2004, shown as a "document being drawn up" in 2026. View the source ↗
38. [S38] Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, "Citizen patrols against burglaries," Colmar, December 9, 2024: residents organizing day and night patrols after a rise in thefts. View the source ↗
39. [S39] La Dépêche du Midi, "Some talked of setting up a militia: in Tournefeuille, residents organize to fight burglaries," July 31, 2025. Accounts of cameras, surveillance among neighbors and plans for patrols; no established militia is shown. View the source ↗
40. [S40] La Dépêche du Midi, "Fenouillet. Residents mobilize against summer burglaries," August 6, 2025: residents taking turns patrolling by day and night, alongside patrols by the municipal police and the gendarmerie. View the source ↗
41. [S41] Euractiv, "Poland rejects joint border patrols with Germany," July 4, 2025: presence of Border Defence Movement "citizen patrols" on the German-Polish border and a government reminder that border protection is the responsibility of the official services, not of paramilitary formations. View the source ↗