G. and I were coming up the hill on Sentier Galilee in a small town south of Paris, taking the paths and passageways where the police never go. Neither of us had masks or permission to travel, the attestation forms required every time you exit the house. We were busy chewing the fat.
‘The problem with this one is,’ G said, stopping to pull a late raspberry and picking up the thread of our conversation, ‘He’s doing a lot of things he wasn’t elected to do.’ G’s dog took off, chasing a bird.
‘Such as,’ I asked.
We crossed the road and headed slowly into town. Quiet houses, few signs of life, an empty movie set. One of those mini-dogs who makes a ton of noise was yaping on a porch as we passed.
‘It’s a long list. Funny, isn’t it ? These guys get into power and their program mutates almost immediately - boom! It’s like those creatures in Alien. And that’s when we find out who they really are.’
Case in point ? With clean Manny Macron, the President who fancied himself Jupiter, much loved by American liberals, it’s hard to know where to begin in the strange-creatures-suddenly-screaming-out-of-his-belly department. We could start with his selling off Alstöm, a national treasure. We could talk about his attempt to turn Social Security into a lottery. We could… but it is now in November, in the ninth month of the year Covid, the days grow shorter, we are back in lockdown, the second anniversary of the Gilets Jaunes movement is upon us. The country is restive. We await the next explosion.
We might as well be prisoners. Instead of a ‘circuit breaker’ confinement in September or October, Macron, like his homologue in the UK, temporised, exactly as he did in February and the first days of March. (Who can forget the night he went out to the theatre on the 7th, gaily telling everyone that, ‘Life goes on ?’ Surely not the stage hands who are staring at penury.) So we go to work, we have a few free hours in a closed city - which we must justify with a written statement stating our reasons to be on the street - and then the doors are closed from 9 until 6. No guests, no social life. Très agréable. The faces are getting long and we’re barely halfway through. We suffer now because Christmas must be preserved.
We are prisoners - of the decisions made by our leaders. They were fully aware that they took the summer off without having a plan for the fall. Cooler weather and people returning from vacations in large numbers was bound to be a volatile mix. And now we hope that two Turkish researchers in Germany will save the day - even if we won’t queue up for the needle until April.
But what did my friend G. mean ? He, an amateur photographer, was referring to the proposed new Global Security law, set to be debated in Parliament this week. A necessary corrective to the lawlessness permeating France, some say. A savvy time to propose such a measure, after the shocking acts perpetrated in the last month, the barbaric beheading of teacher Samuel Paty in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine northwest west of Paris, and the church attack in Nice, not to mention the Charlie Hebdo redux in September, where, fortunately, no one died. The country’s citizens are jittery. Who can blame them ?
And yet, close readers of the bill in draft form characterise it as liberticide, the freedom killer. ‘A tool permitting the forces of order to camouflage their excesses’, said one.
How so ? The proposed law is a kind of mise à jour (update) for national security. Ah but very cannily inserted in the legislation is a little stick of dynamite.
« Art. 35 quinquies. – Est puni d’un an d’emprisonnement et de 45 000 euros d’amende le fait de diffuser, par quelque moyen que ce soit et quel qu’en soit le support, dans le but qu’il soit porté atteinte à son intégrité physique ou psychique, l’image du visage ou tout autre élément d’identification d’un fonctionnaire de la police nationale ou d’un militaire de la gendarmerie nationale lorsqu’il agit dans le cadre d’une opération de police. »
Fancy footwork, non ? « …A fine of 45,000 Euros (not small change, eh ?) or a year in jail for publishing in any media…with the goal of attacking the physical or psychic (!) integrity or providing the facial image or any other identifying element of a member of the national police or a soldier in the gendarmerie during the course of a police action. »
So, the photo below, taken from a video (Handout/AFP), under this proposed law, instead of the assaulting officer and his pal being under investigation, the AFP photographer who took it could be put on trial and fined. Not to mention the famous video of Alexandre Benalla donning riot gear (illegally, he ain’t a cop) and going out to smash a few heads for sport.
This follows by a year and a half after the so-called « Anti-casseur » law the Macron administration proposed, which met a similar fate of near-universal condemnation. Again the same tactic, a controversial insertion allowing police to arrest anyone they disliked even before a demonstration, provided they presented a “menace of particular gravity” with or without prior convictions. That provision, the same sort of vague language employed in this year’s bill, didn’t survive inspection by the Constitutional Court and perhaps more importantly, began the bloodletting at Macron’s en Marche party, which continues to this day.
For those interested in the feel of public demonstrations in France over the last two years you could do worse than my articles on Counterpunch and Medium. If you read French, you don’t need it.
One result of the violent police tactics is that, walking around the cities, you encounter people like the one below, maimed by police bazooka, with the permanent loss of an eye.
(Christophe Archambauylt/AFP)
The story goes further than that. Earlier this year French police seized an encrypted social messaging site known to a be favored haunt of the mafia and other malefactors who don’t file taxes. A rather embarassing bit of business came to light once the site’s recordings were made public : the police were on the site in great numbers, spending their time making kissy-face with extreme right troublemakers. The site was shut down and a few members of police hierarchy got canned. The police no doubt found another site to stage their trysts. This phenomenon will not be unknown to American readers.
The logic behind the proposed law seems to be that in order to get the police to do their jobs they must annually be fêted with more weapons, more praise, and greater turf, more freedom to do whatever they like. Far from being brave enough to defund the police – even a little – it suggests that the police are now an independent force and politicians must do their bidding, not the other way around. For every attempt at reform there is another passage quietly inserted tearing down citizen’s legal rights. In this case, to report on police brutality.
Regarding that snarky paragraph in the new law, David Defresne, director of Un pays qui se tient sage, a new film that documents the Gilet Jaunes manifestations over the last two years, put it quite simply. « La caméra, c’est l’arme des désarmés. » The camera is the arm of the unarmed. The pistol of the powerless. Or, this camera shoots fascists, to bend a line from Woody Guthrie.
Place d’Italie, Paris, November 2019/ jg
Someday someone will write an encomium for the camera, that humble instrument that takes in the world ignoring our prejudices, revealing what we overlooked; that fits in our pocket, more valuable than a wallet; that freed artists from strict representation, and now preserves a memory of our domestic-erotic and consensual worlds at any moment in time; that like the bicycle, is humble, utilitarian, fantastic and quotidian, and so often takes us to places we’ve never been. To that list we must add it tends to find itself on the side of the more complicated version of truth that answers the brutal simplicities of power.
°
We kept going. No cops on the horizon, and in the small towns around the fringe of Paris there are plenty of narrow passages no more than shoulder-wide where a man can slip away without anyone being the wiser. We passed the bankrobber’s preferred watering hole. Closed, of course. Cops can’t really help you - if we had any life-threatening trouble, we’d go to the hospital down the road. It was after 5, still early, and there was plenty of time to move around. The only time of the day when the French are free - after work, before curfew begins, and the French exploit it to the max, strolling everywhere, confident the police won’t demand to see their attestation. Prisoners on work release have more freedom. But it’s only the immortal smokers who exploit it when they stroll right past the cops with their masks off. (Don’t get me wrong but one must have one’s sun, sin and cigarette or we’ll all go mad.)
That’s the fringe of the big city, anyway. The countryside is a different story. Welcome to France 2o2o.