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The lockdown of spring 2020 provides an opportunity to investigate the relationship of different social groups to the State, the sources of their resistance and conformity to public power, in a context of crisis. Based on the continuation of an ethnographic study begun in 2013, this article analyzes the social uses of the State (the practices of the different institutions and public policies), that groups living in a rural and mountain village make under these circumstances. In this situation of expanded statehood, the relationship between politics as well as electoral institutions and individuals of different social backgrounds can be seen in a continuity with pre-existing preferences. The policy of containment is the object of exacerbated collective criticism, of a generalized transgression within this isolated territory as well as, outside of it, of non-compliance with the forces of order. While distrust and resistance to the political and coercive components of the State were exacerbated in this territory by the crisis, the different social groups concomitantly continue to rely unequally on the distributive institutions of the social State and largely conform to previous political modes of behaviour, at least when observed from a distance. A closer relational study of how the governed interact with different State institutions finally shows the importance of practical dimensions in the sociological study of legal-rational legitimation, in addition to public representations and discourses.