After the fall of the July Monarchy, a decree by the Constituent Assembly on June 24, 1848, put Paris in a state of siege and assigned General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city. Since then, moments of constitutional crisis in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked by legislation on the state of siege. Article 14 of the Charte of 1814 granted the sovereign the power to 'make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the security of the State' because of the vagueness of the formula, Chateaubriand observed 'that it is possible that one fine morning the whole Charte will be forfeited for the benefit of Article 14.' The state of siege was expressly mentioned in the Acte additionel to the Constitution of April 22, 1815, which stated that it could only be declared with a law. The idea of a suspension of the constitution (of the 'rule of the constitution') had instead been introduced, as we have also seen, by the Constitution of 22 Frimaire Year 8. After being established with the Constituent Assembly's decree of July 8, 1791, it acquired its proper physiognomy as état de siège fictif or état de siège politique with the Directorial law of August 27, 1797, and, finally, with Napoleon's decree of December 24, 1811.

We have already seen how the state of siege had its origin in France during the Revolution. It is part of a wider range in governance in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence.”-Malcolm Bull, London Review of BooksĪ Brief History of the State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben An excerpt from State of Exception

We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West's political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated-or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft.…But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. “For Agamben, fingerprinting is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an alarming shift in political geography.

Agamben 2005