Liberty, Equality, Police Brutality

As tensions over the government’s pension reform continue to run high in France, the country’s security forces are being accused of trampling on basic human rights in their handling of mass demonstrations that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people to the streets on an almost weekly basis.

Watchdogs in France and abroad, including Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, are sounding the alarm about an “excessive use of force” by French riot police during the protests, which began in January and are still ongoing, despite losing some steam after the wildly unpopular bill was signed into law earlier this month. France is the homeland of equality, liberty, and fraternity—but not all of its riot police have read the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In recent decades, French police tactics have grown more heavy-handed than elsewhere in Europe, and that matters, because French law enforcement practices extend well beyond France, which trains the security forces of dozens of countries around the world, both democratic and authoritarian.

Members of the Parisian Observatory of Public Freedoms, who have been monitoring the rallies in the French capital from the ground, painted a bleak picture of unwarranted police charges aimed at “terrorizing” protesters, widespread physical and verbal abuse of demonstrators, and indiscriminate use of weapons such as crowd dispersal grenades and rubber bullets. 

There has been “a lot of unjustified tear gassing and bludgeoning,” they said, asking not to be identified by name.

Other European riot police can play hardball, too. Spaniards wreaked havoc with Catalan protesters. Italians beat scores of demonstrators to a pulp at the Genoa G-8 protests in 2001. 

But in recent years, French police have been playing in a different league from everyone else. The country has seen multiple waves of tense demonstrations over workers’ rights, as well as months of unrest beginning in 2018 caused by the “yellow vest” movement against taxes and economic inequality. But many argue that the way French police deal with demonstrators is making things worse. The French approach, which entails a gradual increase in the use of force in response to the level of resistance by protesters, is effectively “an escalation doctrine,” said Sebastian Roché, an expert on policing at Sciences Po university in Grenoble. 

French police are more heavily armed than their colleagues elsewhere in Europe. The LBDs, or riot guns firing rubber bullets that can cause severe injuries or even death, are hardly ever seen in Britain or Germany, while they are used extensively—and often without warning—in France. Those weapons are a big part of the reason French riot police injure and kill more than anywhere else in Europe, said Roché, with 36 people severely mutilated at demonstrations since 2018 and three killed in the last 10 years. 

French police have also come under heavy criticism for surrounding and holding up entire groups of protesters, including peaceful ones, as part of their efforts to restore public order. These “fish traps” often end with scores of detentions, but most are then released within a few hours without any charges—a sign, critics say, that they should have never been taken into custody in the first place. On March 16, some 300 people were detained in Paris alone, but only nine ended up facing judicial proceedings. 

This kind of practice “discourages people from participating in the demonstrations,” said Simon Foreman, of France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights. “We have forgotten that the police are a public service that is there to protect the exercise of freedoms, which means protecting demonstrators. Instead, in the French version of maintaining public order, the crowds are seen as hostile, almost as enemies,” he said.

Critics say this attitude is encouraged from the top. Last month, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin warned that “taking part in an unauthorized demonstration is a crime that justifies being detained,” a statement that many have criticized, since it is incorrect. But violence has come from the demonstrators’ ranks, too, with many episodes of vandalism and attacks on the security forces. About 1,000 cops were injured in the second half of March alone, according to the Interior Ministry. 

Police say they are using the minimum force required to restore order. “The vast majority of the public does not want people to be allowed to smash everything up with impunity, with the French taxpayer having to foot the bill,” said Johann Cavallero of Alliance Police Nationale, a police union.

But France doesn’t just have a problem with protests. Over the past six years, the country has been condemned five times by the European Court of Human Rights over physical abuses committed in other situations by its police, which tend to be less popular than the European average—and much less trusted than their German, British, and Nordic counterparts.

French cops could be brutal in the past, too. In the early 1960s, officers on the orders of Paris police head Maurice Papon massacred dozens (if not hundreds) of peaceful Algerian demonstrators, throwing many of them into the Seine. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, France went through a period of low-intensity protests and lower-intensity policing. That changed with the 2005 riots in the country’s deprived banlieues, said Roché. The use of the LBDs became commonplace, and at demonstrations police began chasing troublemakers, even in the middle of the crowds and at the risk of exacerbating tensions with other protesters, too.

In other countries, they just don’t do it that way, even when there are riots in major cities or yobos on the loose. In countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, police give warnings and provide key information to protesters by means of large screens and liaison officers. In Spain, the creation of a mediation department made up of police officers trained in sociology and psychology contributed to a 70 percent decline in the number of incidents at rallies between 2011 and 2014. The spread of a de-escalation culture on the continent was also helped by an EU-funded project that saw 20 organizations from 11 European countries come together in the early 2010s to hammer out new ways to reduce tensions between protesters and the police. 

France did not participate. 

To be sure, while French security forces are more heavy-handed than many of their Western counterparts, France remains far from a police state. Several days of mobilization against the pension reform saw the participation of more than 1 million protesters, with most rallies unfolding without major incidents. Even when clashes do break out, the crackdown is a far cry from the military-style equipment that is typically deployed on similar occasions in the United States. And the number of casualties among protesters, while high by European standards, pales compared to the death tolls reported on the other side of the Atlantic. Cops in Toulouse don’t have tanks; in Topeka, they kind of do.

Yet, with the confidence of many French people in the democratic process shaken by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to force through his embattled pension reform without a vote in Parliament, the strong-arm tactics adopted by the security forces are reinforcing the feeling of an authoritarian slide. 

With another round of nationwide rallies planned for May 1, tensions in the country’s streets are likely far from over. “Sometimes, demonstrations become a release valve for people’s anger against the state,” said Cavallero, of the police union. “Unfortunately, those who are there representing the state are the police,” he said.