The case of Adama Traoré, who died in 2016 in a gendarmerie in the Val-d’Oise, is paradigmatic of this violence with racist overtones. Prior to Macron, state violence was mostly in the working-class suburbs, against people of colonial origin. For sixty years – since 1962 – under various governments of the right, centre or left, nothing like this has been seen. Eighteen months later, however, the IGPN itself, known for its leniency towards offending police officers, was obliged to acknowledge the responsibility of the police in this assault.Īccording to journalist David Dufresne, under the present government police intervention has resulted in three deaths, five severed hands, 28 blindings and 341 serious head injuries. It is therefore the victims who find themselves guilty. you do not go to places that are defined as forbidden and you do not put yourself in situations like this’. Emmanuel Macron, for his part, declared a few days after the Nice demonstration: ‘This lady has not been in contact with the forces of law and order’, before specifying that, ‘when you are fragile. A few months later, the person in charge of this charge, Commissioner Souchi, received the bronze medal for internal security from Christophe Castaner, minister of the interior, which rewards ‘particularly honourable service and exceptional commitment’. Taken to hospital with broken ribs and numerous fractures to the skull, she is still suffering from the after-effects of this attack. The CCTV images show an official coming out of the police cordon at the start of the baton charge and deliberately pushing the elderly Gilet Jaune, who was wearing a black T-shirt and carrying a huge rainbow flag with the word ‘peace’. ‘The atmosphere was very quiet’ and the group was ‘composed mainly of women and elderly people, without breakages or projectiles’, according to the photographers ( Le Monde, 25 June 2019). Let’s recall the case of Geneviève Legay, a 73-year-old anti-globalisation activist, who was bludgeoned and thrown to the ground during a violent and totally disproportionate police charge in front of some hundreds of peaceful demonstrators. But the good old truncheon has also been used to seriously injure a very large number of people. – and a panoply of repression forbidden in most European countries: LBDs (‘Defensive Bullet Launcher’, a fine euphemism!), ‘dis-encirclement grenades’, toxic tear-gas grenades, tasers, etc. ![]() This violence has been carried out using methods – strangulation, flooring, etc. They have none the less seen the most brutal attacks by the forces of law and order against unarmed demonstrators since the end of the colonial war in Algeria. The person responsible for this massacre was the Paris prefect of police, Maurice Papon (tried and condemned, much later, for other reasons: crimes against humanity, collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in the genocide against the Jews).Īdmittedly, the police violence in Macron’s realm over the last two years, starting with the repression of Gilets Jaunes movement, is not equivalent. Yet a peaceful demonstration of Algerians was drowned in blood by the police: hundreds were killed, many of their bodies thrown into the Seine. France was indeed a state governed by the rule of law, the Constitution was in force, Parliament was sitting. ![]() A single example is sufficient: 17 October 1961. We will not recount here all the violence of this type since France became a state governed by the rule of law in 1944. In fact, the sentence is highly ridiculous: there is no rule of law in the world that has not resorted to illegal and illegitimate forms of police violence at some point in its history. This is an almost ideal-typical example (in Max Weber’s terms) of what could be called ‘fake political science’. ![]() These words are unacceptable in a state governed by the rule of law’ (2 March 2019). To justify the brutal police violence under his government, unprecedented since 1961, Macron and his ministers refer to the state’s ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, thus grossly falsifying the thinking of sociologist and political theorist Max Weber.įaced with numerous protests denouncing the violence of the ‘forces of law and order’ against unarmed demonstrators, Emmanuel Macron responded with a historic phrase: ‘Don’t talk about repression and police violence.
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