Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Has France’s Government Overplayed Its Hand?

The speed and scale of the police response mark a dangerous new normal.

On October 2, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez found himself beating back accusations that France’s government had reacted with insufficient vigor to the wave of student protests that has swept the country this autumn. “There are no orders for restraint,” said the minister in charge of internal security, namely the Gendarmes and CRS battalions that are called on to police demonstrations.

This time at least, Nuñez was being brutally honest. The ongoing occupations and wildcat protests, led first by high school students fed up with a fraying secondary education system, have been met by a dramatic and in many ways unprecedented deployment of state power. From the arbitrary arrest and detention of thousands of minors to the use of excessive force by riot police, the government’s primary response to the eruption has been to raise the physical and legal costs of taking to the streets.

Upward of 400,000 students, teachers, and supporters demonstrated across the country on October 6 for the day of national marches since the movement began. The figures of total arrests are now approaching 7,000 individuals, with some 87 percent estimated to be underage minors. These figures already outpace the preventive arrests seen in the beginnings of other social movements such as the 2018 “yellow vest” revolt, which had already set a high bar as far as repressive standards go.

There’s little denying that stiff policing has become a hallmark of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. But according to Alice Cohen-Morzadec, university student and spokesperson for L’Union Étudiante, “Rarely have we seen these levels of tension with seemingly no efforts from the police to de-escalate.” In addition to the calls for more resources for the education system, student protests have increasingly turned their attention to the police response, with demonstrators at this week’s marches holding up signs and banners with slogans like “police everywhere, education nowhere” or “too young to vote, old enough to be tear-gassed.”

Speaking in Parliament on October 6, a few kilometers away from the Paris demonstration, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu dismissed all allegations of a heavy-handed police response. “It’s a lie to claim that there is an intentional and disproportionate use of force by the police,” the prime minister said during government questions. “It’s a dirty slander against the republican police!”

As of October 8, the oversight bureau charged with internal inquiries into the use of force has announced a total of 18 investigations since the beginning of the student mobilization. Among the most harrowing cases are adolescents who have had their jaws shattered by rubber bullets or their hands blown off by explosive stun grenades. One young protester in the outskirts of Paris testified to being dragged along a street covered with broken glass. “I couldn’t breathe, I thought I was going to die,” he told reporters at the........

© The Nation