Something is seriously out of whack in France.

Earlier this week, parliament suspended its normal activities to focus on a scandal that opponents of President Emmanuel Macron are calling "une affaire d'Etat" — a state crisis comparable in seriousness to Watergate.

Opportunism on behalf of Macron's political enemies is part of the reason for the reaction. But to understand what's really going on, it's necessary to remember how frequently French presidents have turned to unofficial security personnel to carry out their bidding, the trauma such incidents left on the national psyche, and how they are now being awakened by the Benalla affair.

Details of the Benalla case, which has seen top Macron aides face questions in parliament, are easy enough to parse: Macron's deputy chief of staff, a 26-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin who grew up in a hardscrabble suburb, was caught on camera at a May Day protest borrowing a helmet from a riot police officer, striding out into the crowd and manhandling two protesters whom police thought may have been throwing projectiles.

It was a bizarre decision from Alexandre Benalla, who had no obvious business being at the May Day protest, or illegally impersonating a police officer. When Macron's office found out, they gave him a slap on the wrist in the form of a two-week suspension. Much of the controversy has focused on the failure to give Benalla a tougher punishment, and the fact that the incident was kept under wraps until Le Monde published a video of Benalla's antics.

Parliament has since questioned Macron's interior minister, his chief of police and, on Tuesday afternoon, his chief of staff and head of Cabinet, about the circumstances of the case and Benalla's status. (Interior Minister Gérard Collomb said he thought the young man was a police officer, only to learn he was not.) After a six-day silence, Macron finally spoke out Tuesday evening, telling members of government and his centrist party: "The person responsible here is me ... You cannot be a leader during the good times and balk when they are difficult. If they want someone to be responsible, he is standing before you."

And yet, unanswered questions are sure to keep feeding the outrage machine: Why didn't Macron come down harder on Benalla? Why did the young man, a former bodyguard, enjoy such privileges, including a vehicle provided by the state with a siren that he could put on the roof to cut through traffic?

The implication is that Benalla enjoyed some sort of special status, and that Macron's team was somehow reluctant to fire him. (Benalla has since been fired, for reasons indirectly related to the May Day protest incident.)

But while those may be serious questions, they seem to fall short of a Watergate-type scandal — a comparison that keeps popping up in French media. On Tuesday, conservative politicians called for a vote of no-confidence in the president over the behavior of a wayward ex-bodyguard.

Parallel police force

Starting with Charles de Gaulle, the father of France's Fifth Republic, French presidents have established parallel police or intelligence staff that would bypass official chains of command to carry out dubious acts. De Gaulle's allies famously used the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), either directly or indirectly — it's still being debated by historians — to conduct operations that were either illegal, or too sensitive to risk confiding to a leak-prone police force.

History books are full of allegations that the SAC engaged in some very rough tactics during the troubled years of the Algerian War, including and not limited to, some argue, the assassination of French officials who were inconvenient to the Gaullist power structure. To this day, the shroud of secrecy around the SAC has never been fully lifted.

In the 1980s, François Mitterrand developed a web of security agents answerable only to him. Unlike De Gaulle, whose SAC was partly composed of former members of the French Resistance (some of them reportedly gangsters), Mitterrand used elite gendarme officers to conduct a massive phone-tapping operation whose objective, it was later revealed, was to keep a lid on the existence of a daughter born out of wedlock.

Just about every prominent journalist in the country under Mitterrand was, at one point or another, spied upon in what would become an "affaire d'etat" that went to trial 20 years after the events.

More recently, Nicolas Sarkozy was accused of running his own parallel police operations via a small coterie of well-connected aides. His then chief of staff, Claude Guéant, was accused of having intercepted communications between investigators who were probing a campaign finance scandal involving Sarkozy.

Even François Hollande, who if anything was known for oversharing with journalists, faced claims that he ran a shadow Cabinet, or "cabinet noir," to conduct operations on his behalf.

The case dredges up these historical parallels, especially because Macron came to power vowing that he would eliminate sleaze from public office.

Jean Garrigues, a professor of history at the University of Orleans and Sciences Po political science institute in Paris, said the comparisons between Macron and former presidents should not be overdone. Nothing in the Benalla affair suggests Macron used him or other staffers to conduct shady business on the president's behalf.

The scandal revolves around an individual, not an organized parallel system, Garrigues pointed out. "We have to be reasonable in our comparisons," he said. "When you talk about the SAC, for example, there was a system that rested on Gaullist parties as well as the Elysée that deliberately operated outside the scope of regular institutions."

But in a country that gives so much power to its president, the case dredges up these historical parallels, especially because Macron came to power vowing that he would eliminate sleaze from public office.

"There is a historical resonance, which has to do with the constant temptation for presidents in the Fifth Republic to protect themselves and overstep the boundaries of legality, which is the characteristic of a system that sometimes allows itself to abuse its power," said Garrigues.

"In this case, we can see traces of that tendency, where a lot of confidence was given to someone whose credentials should have been checked more thoroughly, and to whom was given powers that go beyond what the law dictates. It raises the question of a recurrence of this tendency, which shouldn't exist in a democratic system."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the day on which Emmanuel Macron spoke out. He made his comments on Tuesday evening.