This commentary is by Benjamin Hoffer, an environmental engineering master’s student at École Polytechnique de Paris.
On Sept. 8 I traveled to a tribunal in Paris to testify in a criminal case brought on behalf of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, against a 22-year-old student. I never got the chance. I was sequestered with the other nine witnesses, waiting to be called one at a time — and the next thing we knew, the courtroom was emptied. We were physically forced out of the building by a police wall of more than 50 officers.
I am an engineer from the Upper Valley, completing my master’s degree in Paris. I belong to no French party. I came to testify for my community.
A year ago, in a dingy youth hostel in Barcelona, I came upon a young man sitting alone, reading. I recognized the name on the cover of his book: Murray Bookchin. Bookchin moved to Burlington in 1971, drawn by our tradition of town meetings, and spent 30 years founding the field of social ecology and arguing for direct, deliberative, local democracy within ecological bounds — people talking face to face and governing themselves.
I struck up a conversation because a piece of home had turned up on a stranger’s book cover in a foreign city. We spent a long night exploring the city, speaking in a broken mix of French, Spanish and English. That is how I met Ritchy Thibault: wild-haired, publishing his third book, working on his master’s in anthropology, overwhelmingly kind, generous, brave — and the target of an intense and sustained program of state harassment.
In February 2024, Ritchy got close enough to Macron at an agricultural fair to shout: “L’éborgneur” — the eye-gouger. Never forget this is the country of the French Revolution, the country that beheaded monarchs. In two months of the “yellow vest” protests, the largest popular movement of this century in France, police fired more than 9,000 rubber-bullet rounds. Dozens of people lost an eye or a hand. Verified counts put head injuries above 300.
Ritchy accused a head of state, to his face, of well-documented events. The Élysée responded with a complaint for “menace de mort” — death threat. The trial has been postponed twice, and in the intervening time Ritchy has since been snatched off the street for numerous police detentions, some running close to 50 hours, on the standing judgment that he is a potential threat.
On Sept. 8 he was tried in his absence, without his lawyers, and the witnesses he had called — me among them — were left waiting in a hallway, then forced outside the building entirely. The court reserved judgment. A ruling is due Oct. 6.
If you are reading this in Vermont and filing it under foreign problems, consider what I am doing right now. I am writing an op-ed.
In March 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was taken off a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked federal agents as she walked to an iftar dinner. She was flown to a detention center in rural Louisiana and held for more than six weeks. Her offense was co-authoring an op-ed in her student newspaper. She got out because a federal judge in Vermont ordered her released. Hundreds of student visas have been revoked. More than 3,000 students were arrested on American campuses in the spring of 2024 — for tents, for chants, for sitting down.
Macron and President Donald Trump are distinct, and France is not America, but they have reached the same consensus: When you cannot fix the thing, prosecute the person naming it. A state that spends itself silencing its students has nothing left for the heat, the floods, the fires, the arms race we have stopped even pretending to slow. There is no escaping to Europe or to South America. Bookchin tells us this must be faced on the ground, in the community; Martin Luther King Jr. told us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Here is the part I want my neighbors to hear. The answer is not a better president. We have tried that. As Hannah Arendt put it, those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil. When pragmatism puts society en route to total collapse, toward an uninhabitable world, it is not pragmatic, but idiocy. The answer lies in each other: in idealism, in a stubborn refusal of pragmatism, in refusing to cede authority over our beliefs, our decisions, our futures and our lives.
Dissent makes us stronger. We in New England have roots in that tradition that inspired Bookchin. At Town Meeting, anyone may speak. People say disagreeable things directly to the faces of those who govern them; we decide together, and nobody is arrested.
A Vermont judge freed a student the federal government had shipped a thousand miles from her lawyers. The sheriff in Grafton County, New Hampshire, ended the department’s partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May. Not nearly enough, but these are the functions of a place that still answers to the people in it, and that is the best resource any of us has.
I stood for Ritchy because I could, and because it was right. He was taken into custody again the night before the trial — another arbitrary detention, meant to make sure he was weak and tired when he stood in court. In the end, any public engagement was too much for this fragile hierarchy. We were all expelled.
Where you have a voice, use it. The opportunity to protect others is a gift.
Stand up. Stand up now, while you can.
