5 Anti-migrant Groups in Calais: the Spectacle of Vigilance

Since the start of the 2000s, the city of Calais has become an important crossroads for migratory flows across Europe. After the Touquet agreements between France and the United Kingdom,¹ border controls are no longer carried out in Dover, but in Calais, France. This had the consequence of generating a situation where hundreds or even thousands of refugees found themselves stuck in Calais waiting for an opportunity to pass through the border. Alaux describes these refugees as a population ‘in storage’.² They are very often left without resources and live in makeshift camps called jungles (from the Iranian word djangal, which means forest³). Living conditions are very harsh, and the jungles are regularly evicted by the French police. Refugees reside there for months or even years before getting a chance to cross the border, hiding in lorries or using small boats.

After the Arab revolutions of 2011, the number of refugees increased. After 2015, which saw an influx of migrants throughout Europe, the number of refugees in Calais increased to reach about 10,000 in 2016, concentrated in the Jules Ferry jungle.⁴ This giant makeshift camp was closed down in November 2016 and its occupants sent to CAOs (Reception and Orientation Centres) throughout France. Since then, the situation in Calais, although less publicised, has remained similar but law enforcement officers have dislodged any new settlement swiftly, a situation denounced by NGOs such as Amnesty International.⁵

This situation has caused strong reactions from the population of Calais. Rather than a wholesale rejection of migrants, it has polarised the public in two directions. From a humanist perspective, one side positions itself in favour of helping and welcoming the refugees. On the other side, there is hostile reaction. These two stances have been quite intense and have even led to confrontations. A very complex political game has developed around this issue. Five main political actors can be distinguished in this conflict:

Natacha Bouchart, mayor of Calais, published on her personal Facebook page in November 2013 a call to the citizens of Calais. It asked them to list and report houses and dwellings occupied by refugees to the authorities in order to expel them.⁹ This call to police the situation through vigilantism was heard beyond the mayor’s initial expectations.

Sauvons Calais, an ‘apolitical’ collective, defining itself as a group of ‘concerned citizens’, was formed to respond to this call. Its aim was to map migrant camps and alert public opinion. The apolitical character of the group quickly became questioned when media revealed that Kévin Rêche, the spokesperson, has a swastika tattoo on his chest.¹⁰ In reality, the group was close to the far right, especially the Parti de la France, a right-wing split from the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National). Kévin Rêche was also present on the lists presented by this party for the local elections of March 2015.¹¹ During the summer of 2015, a new group appeared, Les Calaisiens en Colère. While claiming to be apolitical, its spokespersons had connections with the Rassemblement National and Generation Identitaire.¹²

These groups in Calais emerged in a particular political context, that of a border zone. This border is not the frontier of 19th-century American vigilantism where the state was distant and ineffective. On the contrary, this is a frontier where the presence of the French state is obvious both in terms of manpower, with several thousand police officers on the ground, but also in terms of an extremely developed physical security system (walls and fences), financed by the United Kingdom.¹³ This situation of crisis, which partly explains the emergence of these groups, is therefore not linked to the absence of the state. This rules out explaining the emergence of the groups in Calais by a lack of action and presence of public authorities. On the contrary, it is the consequence of French public policies, carried out in a vigorous manner, which arouses the anger of these groups. Indeed, the action of authorities consists in deploying police forces to secure the border between France and Great Britain and thus prevent migrants from leaving the territory. The presence of migrants is therefore the consequence of this securitisation policy since refugees have no other choice than to remain in Calais while waiting for an opportunity to pass through.

Anti-migrant groups appeared in a context of political deadlock in which public authorities, bound by international agreements, were obliged to prevent refugees from crossing the border but, paradoxically because they are prevented from leaving French territory, had no desire to take care of them. Anti-migrant groups linked to the far right have been calling for a radical solution: the suppression of the presence of migrants through mass expulsion. The vigilantism of these groups is to be understood in the light of this political objective.

To take up Rosenbaum and Sederberg’s categories,¹⁴ their action is not crime control vigilantism aimed at individual acts. It is social group vigilantism, targeting a social group as a whole: it is the presence of migrants perceived as criminogenic that is targeted as such.

These groups do not reproduce the model of political vigilantism that has been historically characteristic of the far right: squadrism, which is openly organised political violence.¹⁵ The action of these groups presents certain elements of squadrism, notably through acts of violence against migrants, but it also differentiates itself from squadrism by aspiring to be legitimate and non-violent. As a result, the vigilantism of these groups presents a mixed dimension, displaying several characteristics of squadrism, while holding aspirations for non-violence that seems closer to classic social movements. It is also possible to conceive this vigilantism above all as a spectacle, staged almost permanently on social networks.

Conceptualising the action of these groups is no easy task. Indeed, at first glance their approach seems to be oriented towards classical non-violent demonstrations. Nevertheless, violent acts against migrants do occur in the wake of these events even if this violence is not ‘claimed’ by anti-migrant groups. This violence makes it difficult to categorise these groups as classical social movements that would fit into the WUNC quadrilateral described by Charles Tilly (Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment¹⁶). Likewise, although their roots in the extreme right are obvious, they do not have the full characteristics of squadrism. These groups do not form a political militia whose goal is to fight and terrorise opponents.¹⁷

The seemingly paradoxical nature of the action of these groups can be better understood by referring to the definition of vigilantism by Les Johnston, who conceives it as a social movement whose objective is the restoration of order, but one that is prepared to use violence or at least threaten its use in order it to achieve its goals.¹⁸ This use of the concept of vigilantism to categorise social movements against immigration seems particularly germane. Thus, Lesley Wood, in her analysis of anti-immigration movements in the United States and Canada, has distinguished two kinds of movements.¹⁹ The first consists of broad-based demonstrations with a non-violent perspective that seek to mobilise as many as possible, while the second uses direct action vigilantism, such as the groups that monitor the border between Mexico and the United States.²⁰

It is worth conceiving the action of these groups from an interactional perspective. Their mobilisation takes place in relation to a figure of the enemy, personified by the social group of migrants, portrayed as the threatening ‘Other’, or even an invading force. In the face of this danger, the objective is to mobilise Calaisians to put pressure on the state, including through direct action against migrants –always with the argument of ‘protecting local residents’ from migrants. This interactional perspective will be developed further by examining how these groups conceive the figure of the enemy. The ambiguous relations that these groups maintain with public authorities will be studied too: it alternates between the denunciation of the government and open support for the actions of police forces. Similarly, the way in which the public authorities position themselves regarding these groups will come under scrutiny.

As we shall see, and according to Rosenbaum,²¹ vigilantism cannot be reduced to its tangible dimension: in other words, it is the social staging of the threat that confers its social existence. This perspective is relevant because the actions of the anti-migrant groups in Calais mix elements from the action repertoire of classical social movements with harder vigilantism. If this seems separate and contradictory, it is still based on the same logic of performing an action intended to capture the minds and emotions of the audience. This audience is not only the mainstream media, but their own communitarian audience, reached through social media, notably through their Facebook pages. This guides the style and content of the actions. Even though these groups can only rely on a core group with small numbers –15 to 20 activists for Sauvons Calais, while the Calaisiens en Colère number around 10 – their strategy enables them to effect a disproportionate impact.

Moreover, their small numbers do not prevent them from having the capacity to mobilise numbers. The events they organised drew up to several hundred people. Moreover, their Facebook audience is large: publications are widely viewed and shared.²² The Sauvons Calais group has called numerous demonstrations, and these are often banned by the public authorities. The most publicised occurred on 7 September 2014, which brought together several hundred far-right activists from all over France, and that of 6 February 2016 co-organised with the group PEGIDA. Participants clashed with the police, leading to the arrest of retired parachutist General Christian Piquemal, which was widely reported in the media.²³ In addition, in February 2014, for a period of several weeks the group organised a grassroots mobilisation of locals against a squat in Coulogne. What started as a peaceful sit-in turned into a siege, and the house became the target of stone throwing. It was set on fire after its occupants were forced to leave.²⁴

In the autumn of 2015, the group Calaisiens en Colère held demonstrations that drew up to 800 people. Nevertheless, it has been through their patrol activities that they have gained most visibility. By car, they cruised the streets of Calais and filmed migrants in order to report on their activities. Their videos became very popular, viewed tens or even hundreds of thousands of times. In December 2015, activists abandoned car patrols to organise ‘support rallies’ for French residents living near the Jules Ferry jungle. These rallies were streamed live and, in a tense security context, activists would physically confront refugees. One live video posted online by activists caused a media uproar, because one of the activists pulled out a rubber bullet gun and detonations were subsequently heard (although it was not possible to attribute them to his gun with certainty).²⁵

Taking note of the difficulties highlighted by Mudde concerning the study of far-right groups, two complementary approaches to field research were chosen.²⁶ We conducted some 15 semi-structured interviews during three trips to Calais, in March 2015, June 2015 and December 2018. These interviews were conducted with activists of anti-migrant groups, inhabitants of Coulogne who took part in the siege of the squat in Coulogne without being members of anti-migrant groups, migrants and activists of the movement in support of refugees who were victims of attacks, and finally resource persons (lawyers, associative activists, local journalists) who extensively documented the action of these groups. These interviews were supplemented with the direct observation of a press conference on 7 June 2015. From a visual sociology perspective,²⁷ we filmed interviews when people agreed to do so. An analysis of the content published on the Facebook pages of the two groups was also conducted.

In socio-professional terms, it was not possible to access data on all the members of the Sauvons Calais collective, but interviewed members present fairly similar profiles. Kévin Rêche left high school at the age of 16 without graduating. He is unemployed, having failed to pass the security guard exam. E., with whom we have had contacts over the phone but who finally refused an interview, was 21 years old at that time. He is a shopkeeper in the supermarket sector. M., for his part, was 36 years old and an unemployed former fixed-term administrative agent. Finally, D., a former member of the collective also aged 36, was a temporary construction worker with a high school degree. Although in the absence of data on all the members, it is not possible to generalise about the sociology of the collective as a whole, it is nevertheless possible to state that the activists present a profile similar to those of the Aisne skinheads studied by François,²⁸ with precarious employment and a working-class background.

There will be a further focus on two members and their participation in the group. The first is D., a 36-year-old man. He was employed as a casino dealer, and then became a temp construction worker after he lost his casino job. He felt that he experienced difficulties finding work. The second is M., a 34-year-old man, who was a contractual administrative agent in National Education. He had been unemployed for two years at the time of the interview.

Their activist careers are quite long. D. was a member of the Identitarian movement for ten years, in the Jeunesses Identitaires, then in the Bloc Identitaire, which he left because of political disagreements, because according to him: ‘They have adopted a rather hard Catholic line and I am an atheist’. He then became part of the National Front list in the 2014 council elections, but felt very disappointed about this experience because ‘they [the National Front] did not propose anything for Calais’. He claimed that he had come across ‘incredibly incompetent people’. Now ‘without label’ (meaning being part of a political organisation) he participated for some months in the actions of Sauvons Calais. He then left the collective, because he felt that the role of the Parti de la France was too important within the group. He then joined Les Calaisiens en Colère, which he helped create.

For his part, M. was both a member of the Parti de la France and Sauvons Calais. He said he moderated the Facebook page and attended meetings. He presented himself as a former organiser of the National Front, of which he was a member and activist for many years. He left it after the ‘de-demonisation’, which was a move by Marine Le Pen to steer away from the extreme right wing to populist radical right, trying to make the party more acceptable to French public opinion. He criticised the National Front for not talking enough about immigration ‘to avoid media stigmatisation or accusations of antisemitism’.

Both were extremely careful not to disclose any sensitive information about the internal life of the group that may compromise its secrecy. Thus, D. only made general statements, saying several times ‘Kevin is nice’ even though he seemed strongly critical of his political positions. In the same way, M. made little mention of the group’s actions, focusing the interview on more general ideological considerations as soon as the subject was evoked. Concerning the lexicon used by the two activists, several terms seemed particularly interesting. First of all, there are terms frequently used in the ‘fachosphere’,²⁹ which in France is the name given by the media to the far-right online communities. Thus, D. used terms such as ‘socialist dictatorship’, which was very popular in the ‘fachosphere’ and comes from the Hollande Resign campaign, launched by activists of the Identitarian movement and taken up by the Manif pour tous (social movement against same-sex marriage). He also used the term ‘#pasdamalgam’ to label the ‘anti-racist do-gooders’ who refused to equate immigration and delinquency. It should be noted that these terms are both put forward by the Identarian movement.

Both used the word ‘squat’ very frequently to refer to migrants, with animosity in their voices. The opening of squats seemed to be an important element in their engagement, which they perceived as particularly intolerable. Regarding immigration, M. described it as ‘shared suffering’. On the one hand, the ‘French’ would suffer from the deterioration of their living conditions caused by economic competition and insecurity, which would be linked to migrants. On the other hand, the exiles would suffer from being ‘uprooted’, in Western countries whose culture would be ‘foreign’ to them. This concept of ‘shared suffering’ stems from the National Front’s very harsh discourse on immigration in the 1990s, calling for ‘forced returns’.³⁰

Concerning the reasons for his activism, D. explained that he became involved because he felt ‘fed up with migrants’, because ‘they squatted two houses away from my house, it was unbearable’. More than a desire for justice or dignity, he expressed a desire to ‘put an end to the situation’ for ‘a return to normality’, because ‘the shopkeepers have lost their customers because of the illegal immigrants’. For him, the solution to restore order would be ‘a closed centre’ to lock up all refugees. He believed that this closed camp should be managed by the British state ‘who is responsible for the situation’, a claim shared by M. who, for his part, considered that the camp should be managed by the French state, but also by ‘concerned citizens’ such as members of Sauvons Calais.

These two activists have in common a long history of activism, marked by interruptions and breaks. Their involvement in anti-migrant groups is seen as the result of the ‘inaction’ of the National Front. The fact that they went through this party is another common point, as well as their split, which is also the case for Kévin Rêche, who despite his young age went through the National Front.³¹ We can see that the National Front does indeed play a role as a matrix for activists (which may be compared to UKIP in the UK even though the political positionings of both parties present significant differences). They are thus experienced activists, strongly inserted within the field of the far right. Another common point can be noted: their limited economic integration. One is unemployed and the other regularly alternates periods of employment and inactivity. This situation of economic precariousness is also shared by Kévin Rêche, who holds a vocational aptitude certificate (CAP), has never been employed and still lives with his mother.

We also had the chance to conduct a very interesting interview with K., whose profile is quite different. She resides in Coulogne and participated in campaigns organised by Sauvons Calais against a squat when it was opened by activists. She was moved by rumours spread online, but also by the neighbours, according to which a squat accommodating around a hundred migrants had just been opened by the No Border group. At first, she participated in the protests, which turned into a besiegement of the squat.³² This was her first experience of activism.

She then left the campaign and switched to the side of the refugee solidarity movement following a trigger event: she went to talk to the No Border activists occupying the house, which convinced her to shift positions. She stated that the cause of this switch was the ‘threshold of numbers’: she realised that it was not ‘a hundred migrants’ who inhabited the house, but ‘about a dozen’, which reassured her and led her to question her commitment to the anti-squat campaign, then to withdraw from it, and finally to join the opponents of Sauvons Calais, the movement in solidarity with refugees. She joined Calais Ouverture et Humanité and participated for several months in their activities as well as in the food distributions of the charity Salam.

She also talked about the conversations she had online with Kévin Rêche’s ex-girlfriend, S. She claimed to be one of the people who had encouraged her to leave the group. It is interesting to note that S., since her break-up with Kévin Rêche, had rejected the ideas of the group, and has married an Afghan refugee.³³ She was for a time involved in the same pro-refugee group as K. (Calais Ouverture et Humanité). K. then gradually discontinued her involvement. There were several reasons for this withdrawal, the first being that she felt she had been over-invested, with a pace that was hard to keep up with. In addition, she experienced a series of pressures. Her son was bullied at school because of her involvement. For her part, she was regularly harassed online by the residents of Coulogne as well as by Sauvons Calais activists. She mentioned also that her mother blamed her for her activism. After she saw a photo of her with refugees, she told her ‘you’re crazy, you’re putting your children in danger, you’re going to bring illnesses back home’. At the end of the interview, she also confided that her ‘husband was not too keen for me to get involved’.

K.’s profile is very different from that of the two previous activists. Without any prior background in activism, she became involved after a moral shock, in the sense given by Jasper, i.e. an event that arouses a strong emotion capable of modifying a person’s framing and vision of the world.³⁴ This is prompted by the opening of the squat, which pushed her to join one camp, then another. Moreover, at the time we met her, her commitment had ceased several months earlier, as it seemed to be challenged by the social pressure she was under from her environment (family, community).

It is also interesting to consider the relationship of anti-migrant groups to other actors in the local political arena. A politics defined by conflict seems essential in the construction and orientation of their group identity. This is characterised by two oppositions: the first, extremely strong, aimed towards migrants and their allies. The second, which may vary in intensity, is their opposition to the public authorities. They will sometimes denounce the government’s inaction but at other times voice their support for law enforcement agencies.

The agonistic relationship to the enemy is essential to the identity of these groups. For sure, it is the extremely strong opposition to the migrant social group that is the driver for collective action.³⁵ These groups present the Calaisian identity as ‘ruined’ and in ‘decay’, in a nutshell, a debilitated identity. They proposed to recover it through participation in a fighting community bringing together activists in a political struggle. This opposition to migrants who represent an external enemy is supplemented by an internal enemy: NGOs and above all No Border have been portrayed as a treacherous fifth column.

These two extremely strong oppositions were in evidence at the press conference of 7 June 2015. Migrants were referred to by terms such as ‘invasion’ and ‘colonisation’. The situation in Calais was described as an ‘abscess’. Yvan Benedetti (leader of the Parti Nationaliste Français) spoke about a ‘migratory flood’, which would presage not only an apocalyptic future for the city, but also for the whole of France.³⁶

Speakers insisted that the French government would not allow the police to do their job. A lack of political will on the part of the state justified the use of vigilantism. Sauvons Calais called for the dissolution of ‘migrationist’ groups supposedly bringing migrants to the slaughterhouse ‘like slave traders’, for the benefit of ‘international finance and the oligarchy’. They also demanded the ‘dissolution of all NGOs’ that help migrants in one way or another, especially No Border, perceived as ‘the worst enemy of the French people’.

This was coupled with a call for the closure of borders and a total halt to extra-European immigration. According to Yvan Benedetti, ‘when the plate is empty, there should no question of bringing in extra mouths, foreign mouths to share what little we have left’. Moreover, this closure was a humanitarian response – to avoid ‘human trafficking’. Over the longer term, non-European populations should be repatriated in order to ‘protect the French’. Labelling immigration as ‘shared suffering’, for Benedetti, mass deportation would end suffering for both the ‘uprooted’ and the ‘native populations’. Finally, Benedetti adds, there is no need to welcome refugees or asylum seekers: according to him, refugees are ‘cowards’. If a situation is unbearable, in a country at war, refugees should stay and fight against oppression, rather than flee to Europe. Challenging the notion of political refugee, he even calls into question their masculinity: ‘These men have no courage, what do they have between their legs?’.

In Calais, the immediate objective of the anti-migrant groups was to lock-up all migrants in a closed camp. Citizen self-defence committees should be set up to support the police in the round-up of refugees, helping in their arrest.

If strong opposition to the figure of the refugee is obvious, opposition towards public authorities is weaker, ambivalent and variable. In the first place, it should be recalled that the creation of Sauvons Calais was not an autonomous act. Its activists responded to the call from the mayor of Calais who asked local residents to list and report migrants’ dwellings. The group therefore started its activities from the perspective of supporting public authorities. Moreover, it targeted its demands to public authorities: the dissolution of the NGOs and No Border; the request for the migrants to be interned in a camp is addressed to the state. In that sense, the relationship to authorities is similar to that of classical social movements.

These demands were accompanied by a strong denunciation of the government, at the time led by PM Manuel Valls. He was accused of not allowing the police to do their job. It would be a lack of political will on the part of the state that justified their vigilantism. However, there has still been residual support for police officers, fighting on the ‘front line’ when dealing with refugees. Action would sometimes be oriented in support of the police, going as far as to make claims to be fighting alongside the police during confrontations between police forces and migrants. This can be seen on the Facebook page of Les Calaisiens en Colère:

Ambivalence is also reflected in the way that public authorities have interacted with these groups. This is particularly obvious when speaking with Emmanuel Agius, First Deputy Mayor of the City of Calais. When interviewed, Agius labelled anti-migrant activists as ‘far-right thugs’ and ‘good-for-nothings’ and declared to us that ‘extremist groups that preach hatred should be banned’. He claimed he had never met them. Yet these statements have been contradicted by activists of Sauvons Calais who, on the contrary, claim to have had a meeting with Emmanuel Agius in his office. Agius was said to have listened attentively to the demands of the activists.

Ambivalence can also be found in the attitude of law enforcement towards the actions of anti-migrant groups. For example, during the sit-in against the squat in Coulogne, demonstrators threw stones at the squat every night for a whole week, sometimes in front of police patrol cars. According to La Voix du Nord, this squat was opened on rue Émile Dumont in Coulogne near Calais on 2 February 2014.³⁷ It was inhabited by activists of the No Border movement. Members of Sauvons Calais organised a sit-in, joined by residents from the neighbourhood, and demanded eviction of the squat. With the active participation from neighbours, this sit-in rapidly turned into a siege, which lasted 15 days. Scores of stones were thrown by demonstrators: they made the house uninhabitable as the roof was damaged beyond repair; the building was then destroyed by fire once the occupants had been forced to leave.

Interviews were carried out with the protagonists of these events: the mayor of the village, local residents who participated in the mobilisation, activists of Sauvons Calais, as well as the pro-refugee activists who occupied the squat. In psychological terms, there was some embarrassment among most participants in these events. They had difficulties acknowledging their contribution, and even more so their responsibilities, passing the buck regarding the violence that led to the destruction of the squat.

Thus for J., a resident who took part: ‘The people of Coulogne didn’t want it to get bigger’, an expression he repeats several times. J. did not want to talk about the events at first. He then explained that: ‘It wasn’t done with any brutality, there was no violence’. He then added that people threw stones at the tiles of the roof for eight days, but according to him: ‘There was no brutality’ and ‘It was very well organised’. Comparing these statements to the rest of the witnesses, it is possible to note minimisation of violence. For his part, the mayor of Coulogne tells us that the mayor’s office handled the problem in a legal manner. According to him, it was Sauvons Calais that organised the sit-in and was at the origin of the violence. He added that the activists of Sauvons Calais went ‘to fill big bags of stones on the railway tracks and brought them to the protests to organise the stoning’.

According to M., an activist from Sauvons Calais, there was no violence. Accusations linking Sauvons Calais to the stone throwing were said to originate from the ‘pro-immigration lobby and more particularly No Border’. He claimed that Sauvons Calais is a ‘respectable group’ and that violence formed no part of its modus operandi. According to him, the various attacks on the squat originated from people he did not know: ‘There is no evidence that the members of our group are involved in this violence’. ‘We can’t take responsibility for all individual acts committed by disturbed people.’

K., who took part in the sit-in before changing her position towards refugees, told us a rather different version of events. According to her, there were rumours in the neighbourhood that ‘the occupied farm was going to take in about 100 migrants’. Sauvons Calais then organised a demonstration in front of the farm, which attracted many local residents. She took part, as did most of her neighbours. She says: ‘I went there several times, I participated’. Then she went to talk to the No Border activist who occupied the farm. This interaction led her to switch sides in this conflict. She stopped participating and got closer to the pro-refugee movement. She told us that she heard people yelling at night near the squat: ‘words like gas chamber’ and she witnessed attempts to break into the squat by Sauvons Calais activists. She said: ‘What worries me most is that it was a general madness, there were parents and their children throwing stones. Sauvons Calais, they’re not stupid, they didn’t throw stones in public, they went to groups, encouraged them and gave them stones’.

W.’s account, a pro-refugee activist, corroborates what K. said and criticises the non-intervention of the police. Despite Molotov cocktails being thrown on two occasions and stones being thrown continuously, police forces were only present during the day, the police patrol car leaving around 8 pm. The most serious violence took place just after the police left. The No Border activists organised phoning sessions where many people called the police to report the violence but there was no police intervention to stop it. According to W.: ‘What I learned that day is that you can stone your neighbour’s roof, and according to the local precinct, this is not a public order disturbance’.

This event reveals elements from the action repertoire of both vigilantism and classical social movements. It begins with the grassroots mobilisation of the neighbourhood against an occupation and with the organisation of daily demonstrations. In a second stage, vigilantism takes over. In this way, the attacks on the property opened the way. These were organised by the activists of Sauvons Calais who did not compromise themselves publicly. It was only at night, when the police were not present, and when most of the locals had returned to their homes, that the most serious violence took place: death threats, attempted breakins, stone throwing, but also throwing of Molotov cocktails. It was also at night that the squatted house was set on fire, once its occupants had abandoned it.

A similar lack of police intervention could be found during ‘support rallies’ for the police against residents of the Jules Ferry jungle in December 2015 and January 2016. As we have already seen, the support of the activists during skirmishes with refugees was acknowledged by the police, who had no problem with ordinary citizens supporting them during policing operations, even though, according to French law, these operations are the exclusive prerogative of the state. It was only in February, after two months of interventions and skirmishes, that the Calaisiens en Colère declared in the press that they had received a visit from a police officer who politely asked them to stop their activities.³⁸

That being said, while the public authorities seemed to ignore or at least tolerate vigilante activities, this was not the case with several demonstrations by Sauvons Calais. The demonstration of 7 September 2014 led to violence and highly publicised Nazi salutes by some demonstrators.³⁹ Following that, the public authorities showed little tolerance for Sauvons Calais demonstrations. These were frequently banned, such as the demonstration of 7 June 2015 or the PEGIDA demonstration of 6 February 2016. When activists tried to defy the ban, the police attacked the crowd and made arrests.⁴⁰

These elements underline the ambivalent relationship between actors. Antimigrant groups claimed to support the government when their objectives were similar, but also to position themselves in the ‘camp of order’. At the same time, they have denounced the general attitude of the government in order to forward their demands. On the government side, we have the impression that the management of anti-migrant groups has been eminently political, rather than in strict application of the law. Some illegal activities did not elicit a response from law enforcement agencies, while other activities that were nevertheless legal, such as demonstrations, were prohibited.

To better understand their action repertoire, it should be recalled that according to Charles Tilly, the existence of social movements in their modern form implies the existence of public opinion.⁴¹ In contrast to revolutionary or insurrectional movements, the tactics of these social movements are as follows: by implementing actions, which are part of a tactical repertoire, the aim is to raise public awareness and apply pressure on the authorities, which may be sensitive to the variations of public opinion.

As Patrick Champagne states, following Bourdieu, public opinion does not exist in itself, but is an artefact: major media and polling institutes produce or rather construct ‘public opinion’ that does not necessarily correspond to the actual conceptions of the people who constitute the body of citizens. For Champagne, this public opinion is generated by the action of its measurement: polls, whose reliability is questionable, to say the least, or micro-surveys presenting the opinion of specific users chosen ‘randomly’. In this conception, public opinion is artificial: a few media actors and polling institutes have the power to construct a social image of what citizens supposedly think.⁴²

In this model, these actors are the gatekeepers of media visibility. Not surprisingly, the actions of social movements will be oriented towards the production of images fit into the frame constructed by these gatekeepers. Actions are staged according to the ways in which the media will report on them. This orientation conceives the action of social movements as spectacle. Describing a farmers’ demonstration in the 1980s, Champagne asserts that it was a ‘paper demonstration’, because the actions undertaken were above all aimed at achieving maximum press coverage. Here, the action is not direct, but mediated, towards the media, which has the power to shape or define ‘public opinion’.⁴³

To this extent, the action of social movements consists at least partly in the production of a spectacle for media audiences. The nature of the media will influence the content of the actions of social movements. According to Marshall McLuhan, each medium presents different characteristics. These characteristics then determine the format of the actions:⁴⁴ depending on the nature of the media, the content will adapt and the spectacle of the social movement will therefore be different. There is therefore a link between the nature of a social movement’s action repertoire and that of the targeted media.

The model described by Patrick Champagne speaks to the media landscape of the 1980s. Yet, as Stefano Cristante phrases it, in his model of the doxa sphere,⁴⁵ the construction of public opinion has since been modified by the growth of social media (Facebook, Twitter, and so on). Critically, social media allows social movement actors to directly reach audiences by building a communitarian following without necessarily going through the gatekeeping of mainstream media.

This creates a two-headed orientation for the action repertoire of social movements. Some groups, especially far-right groups, tend to target their audience through social media such as Facebook, which has been particularly important because of its high rate of use. Social media thus constitutes a new outlet for social movements. By a logic built on ‘going viral’, widely shared content can sometimes compete with the audiences of mainstream mass media in terms of reach. This explains why the action of anti-migrant groups is carried out with the objective of creating a spectacle for its public reached through social media.

The most successful expression of this logic can be found in the patrols of the Calaisiens en Colère, which have been broadcast either live on Facebook or after a rough editing. The comments in these videos picture Calais as a war zone between the police and migrants, with migrants allegedly invading the city and sowing chaos.

The activists who patrolled by car intended to provide some kind of ‘war report’ of the front line, documenting the presence of migrants in real time and providing a map of the ‘danger’. In a second phase, the activists no longer limited themselves to monitoring and public exposure but started to intervene. For instance, they started clearing barricades erected by migrants on roads.

As time went on, the interventions grew bolder. In December 2015 and January 2016, the group organised ‘security rallies’ on the outskirts of the Jules Ferry jungle, where police and migrants regularly clashed. The activists filmed themselves fighting the migrants and supporting riot police interventions, acting as a supporting force for the police (which initially seemed to accept this help). This support for the police was thus claimed on the Facebook page, even calling on the public to join in the actions.

These videos became very popular. While the page of Sauvons Calais reached 20,000 followers after three years of existence, the page of Calaisiens en Colère was followed by 80,000 people. Published videos were viewed tens of thousands of times and drew many comments, which shows that this spectacle has managed to attract the attention of a large audience.

Thus, the staging of the patrols was clearly intended to engage the public and create a ‘communitarian’ audience around the Facebook page, which in turn encouraged Calaisiens en Colère to undertake further actions. However, when the mainstream media took an interest in the actions filmed on Facebook things turned sour. When a video of clashes was posted online (mentioned above), it became possible to see a participant in the ‘security rounds’ declare ‘I’m pulling out my gun’, and then that person could be seen drawing what looks like a rubber bullet gun. Afterwards, detonations could be heard but it is impossible to know precisely whether these shots are fired by the police or by Calaisiens en Colère activists.⁴⁶

This video, posted on the page of Calaisiens en Colère, before being quickly removed, went viral until it attracted the attention of mainstream media.⁴⁷ The media commentary pointed out that the participation of the Calaisiens en Colère in crowd policing alongside the police was entirely illegal.

This tends to show that social media have not completely replaced traditional media in the representation of social movements. On the one hand, the spectacle of vigilance makes it possible to reach a wide and sympathetic public. On the other hand, when the same actions pass into the ‘traditional media’ sphere, they can provoke the indignation of a much wider public and this can negatively impact on the claims that Calaisiens en Colère made to being ‘apolitical’, ‘non-violent’ and ‘respectable’. The group tried to use distancing strategies. But these did not seem very effective and the group announced on Facebook that the patrols would end in February 2016.⁴⁸

The following is a statement by ‘Laurent’, a member of the Calaisiens en Colère who tried to justify himself in the columns of Nord Littoral: ‘Wednesday I was there, yes, but I wasn’t armed with a stick’. He confided, however, that some of the activists were armed with sticks, ‘but it wasn’t us! That’s another reason why we’re standing back’. And then he added, in defence of the group’s image of respectability: ‘Some people want to come with pepper spray etc. We don’t want to be seen as violent people’. According to witnesses, he was seen carrying a club. He kicked from the sidelines. ‘Three people wear the same jacket as me.’ A simple coincidence, according to him.⁴⁹ Different action repertoires clash depending on whether they are aimed at one representation regime or the other.

The action of these groups constitutes a form of vigilantism whose objective is not direct territorial control of Calais: this ground is firmly held by the police. The action repertoire of vigilantism is primarily used by these groups to increase their visibility and communicate their action through social media. The idea is to create a communitarian audience to mobilise its public more widely. This political use of vigilantism may impact on public debate but this is difficult to quantify precisely. However, for indicative purposes, it is worth by noting that the two groups have been the subject of 64 press articles in the regional and national daily press (listed in the Europress database) across a three-year period. This coverage is in addition to their audience reach on social networks, which is their core audience. This attracts hundreds of thousands of views, one publication being shared more than 37,000 times, for example.

In the end, their demands were partly met in November 2016 with the dismantling of the Jules Ferry jungle and the transfer of migrants to refugee centres across French territory. However, it is difficult to assess the extent to which it was the specific action of these groups that influenced public policies. Nonetheless, their actions brought three elements together that seem characteristic of movements against immigration in France: a willingness to implement practices that are akin to vigilantism; a vision of the world where community is made possible by opposition to a figure of the enemy; and finally the spectacular staging of a repertoire of action in order to ‘go viral’ on social media.