This month marks the anniversary of two years of revolution and the Gilets Jaunes protest in France; one which has met with repression and a shift in the government of France not toward liberation, but toward a brutal police state of force and control.
As with all tyrannies, dissent and resistance become pretexts for the escalation of force and the centralization of power; the strategy of Trump’s three coup attempts in 2020 to provide a causus belli for the federal occupation of Democratic cities by having police provocateurs and deniable forces of white supremacist terror disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests with violence and looting. The parallels between America under Trump and France are alarming, but illuminating as well.
Other nations have proven less resilient to this subversion of democracy; among them France, which I would have thought impossible. Consider the cultural shift necessary to transform a nation in which protest is enshrined and valorized in the national identity as a patriotic duty to one wherein police brutalize protesters rather than embrace them as comrades in the cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the universal Rights of Man are become contingent on their service to authority. I’d have said the same of us, once.
France is fallen, but like America with our electoral repudiation of Trump and fascism, may yet rise again.
As written by Andre Kapsas in Jacobin; “When the gilets jaunes revolt began on November 17, 2018, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to barricades and roundabouts across France, police had initially seemed overwhelmed. “I thought it was the revolution,” says Youri, sitting with a group of fellow leftist activists from Montreuil, eastern Paris. His comrade Julien remembers a Paris deserted by the police: “There was no more state, the street was ours, not a cop in sight; we could roam through the whole city, we thought we were hallucinating.”
But if in the very first days of the movement the authorities vacillated, before long they turned to crude repression. Week after week over the next year and more, the gilets jaunes took to the streets — and the police met them with increasing brutality. “Only” one person was killed, but hundreds were left with serious, even permanent, injuries; over eleven thousand people were arrested; and at least several hundred are still in jail. Through their response, French authorities introduced new norms of judicial repression — both dramatically and permanently restricting the room for democratic protest.”
The police forces’ violent reaction was completely disproportionate,” lawyer Arié Alimi tells me over the phone — emphasizing that the gilets jaunes mostly attacked objects, while the police attacked people. For seventeen years an ardent defender of victims of police brutality, he talks with indignation about the “thousands and thousands of people injured, with considerable physical and psychological traumas.” Advocacy officer on civil liberties at Amnesty International, Anne-Sophie Simpere agrees, describing the police reaction as “illegitimate, unnecessary, and completely disproportionate.” She calls the events in December 2018 a rapid “intensification of previously existing, worrying trends in the policing of demonstrations” — citing the use of weapons and a switch from crowd control to aggressive arrests that cause serious injuries.
According to the “Désarmons-les” (“Let’s Disarm Them”) collective, French police maimed almost as many people in the first six months of the gilets jaunes movement as they had in the last twenty years. The main serious injuries were eyes being put out (twenty-four) and hands torn off (five), mostly because of the massive use of weapons classified as war weapons, such as flash-balls and sting-ball grenades. Zineb Redouane, an eighty-year-old woman, was also killed by the police, as a tear gas grenade exploded during a protest in Marseille; in her final hours, she claimed that she had been targeted on purpose. Another 284 head injuries were reported among protesters as well as journalists, who were also often attacked by police.
Another major urban center of the movement was Toulouse, southwest France, where Pascal Gassiot took part in almost all demonstrations as a member of the independent “Observatory of Police Practices.” He tells me that “the level of violence was extremely high, with a striking asymmetry in the police response.” Despite wearing recognizable clothing and standing to one side, observers were attacked twenty-seven times by police in Toulouse; four of them ended up in the hospital, including Gassiot himself. “There is absolutely no doubt that they were doing it on purpose,” he tells me: “I was filming a protester being charged over nothing, and I didn’t see the [Brigade anti-criminalité] coming in, with one of them tackling me to the ground.” With his head cracked open and two broken ribs, Gassiot had to be taken to the emergency room. He nonetheless soon returned to his work.
For Gassiot, the police violence obeyed the political strategy of a government full of “class contempt” for rural, lower-middle-class, and poor protesters. “They thought they’d strike a good blow on their mug, and these plebs would go back in their hole,” he sarcastically notes. A veteran radical left activist, the sixty-five-year-old has no doubt that “police violence is on a level unseen since the 1970s, worse than May ’68″ when France was on the brink of revolution. “It was like the war in Algeria, but without the dead,” he says — drawing parallels with the state violence of sixty years ago, when police killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians and French communists on the streets of Paris during the colonial war in Algeria.
Bringing the War Home
The infamous Brigade anti-criminalité (BAC) best illustrates this gradual importation of methods of colonial policing into the French mainland, moving first into the banlieues — the working-class suburbs heavily populated by people with a migrant background — and finally extending them across the whole population. As Alimi stresses, it was a former senior civil servant in the colonies who set up these brigades in Paris and its suburbs in the early 1970s. “The BAC were brigades created specifically for Algerian migrant populations,” he explains.
In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics.
Alimi invokes the long history of police violence against the workers’ movement, saying that we should properly speak of “contemporary police violence, with new methods.” For him, “the working-class suburbs were a laboratory for new practices of police repression introduced by the BAC, with new arrest techniques, permanent control, racial profiling, and new weapons like the flash-balls and grenades. . . . The poor migrant populations were guinea pigs for those methods, that then spread to political activists, social movements, and now to protesters in city centers.” The main architect of this shift was Nicolas Sarkozy, interior minister when he replaced neighborhood police with intervention units like the BAC in 2003, before becoming president in 2007.
In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics. Simpere speaks of “very repressive laws that allow almost anyone, including peaceful demonstrators, to be arrested, often ‘preventatively.’” More specifically, she points out the use of two vaguely defined laws that she considers contrary to international law: one punishing the “preparation of group violence,” under which many people with protective gear like goggles have faced judicial persecution; and one forbidding “contempt toward police forces,” used more than twenty thousand times in 2019 alone. She cites the case of protesters in Narbonne prosecuted for this offense, simply because they had a banner denouncing the severe injuries caused by flash-balls.
In early December 2018, the authorities started to widely disregard their own laws. Alimi calls it “state illegality,” a concept he plans to elaborate in an upcoming book: “The state itself becomes criminal,” he explains, “as its representatives decide to deliberately violate the law to prevent the expression of civil liberties.” In addition to mass preventive arrests and illegal searches, he names the case of a state prosecutor calling on his substitutes to keep people in custody for the maximum length in order to prevent them from demonstrating, despite having no evidence against them. “France shifted from a justice system that punishes actions to a justice system that punishes intentions,” he says.
This judicial repression has led to unprecedented numbers of arrests, with more than eleven thousand detained and more than three thousand convicted. “The courts were working like a production line,” recalls Gassiot, “with speedy trials on Mondays for those arrested on Saturdays.” Alimi counts about seven hundred to eight hundred gilets jaunes currently in jail — and he has himself defended many of those arrested. “They have been victims of an incomparable judicial violence and discrimination; they’ve been treated like animals,” he says. Unusually for France, even people with no criminal records were sentenced to jail time. “They were lower-middle-class people endangered by poverty; they were simply trying to keep their head above water, but they were pushed down — and drowned.”
Police Impunity
This swift and merciless justice against the gilets jaunes contrasted with the lack of judicial reaction to police brutality. Despite the thousands of acts of violence against protesters — many of them proven by solid video evidence — the available information reveals that only seven police officers have been convicted. All of them received suspended sentences, with no discharge. Simpere describes the cases as “largely symbolic,” expressing her “serious doubt that there will be sentences corresponding to the seriousness of injuries.” Alimi is less diplomatic, calling the few convictions “crumbs thrown to the people to calm popular anger.”
Alimi goes further, stressing the whole systemic structure enabling police impunity in France. He says it starts with police officers and their hierarchy “who never acknowledge any act of violence and put into place a set of dissimulation measures every time there is any violence, including the systematic faking of official reports.” He then goes on to point out the lack of judicial independence in France, where “prosecutors are under the authority of the Justice Ministry, and see themselves as protecting public order, which leads them to protect the police.” This translates into prosecutors lying and blocking inquiries, among other things, by reacting more than thirty days after events, once footage from public cameras has already been erased.
Despite facing this “judicial wall,” Alimi says that amateur videos are changing the game. His team has imported techniques from groups like Black Lives Matter, making online calls for videos and witnesses. “Those videos have shattered the administration’s lies and have revealed dissimulation techniques.” As for judges, Alimi also points out that some are starting to recognize the need for real investigations into police work, but he says that it is too early to make an honest appraisal of investigations into police violence against the gilets jaunes. “We will know in two to three years,” he says, “then we can make a final assessment of those investigations, and maybe even talk about a transformation of the approach to police violence.”
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/gilets-jaunes-yellow-vests-protests-france-police-brutality
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/gilets-jaunes-yellow-vests-movement-protests-anniversary-france
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/gilets-jaunes-france-emmanuel-macron
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/yellow-vests-urban-periurban-planning-cars-policy
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/yellow-vests-unions-gilets-jaunes-macron
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/yellow-vests-fuel-prices-france-protests
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/yellow-vests-france-gilets-jaunes-fuel-macron
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