The hardening of repression, the criminalization of young people from housing projects and protesters, the militarization of the police, and the institutional cover-up of their criminal acts are frequently denounced today. But politically motivated rhetoric also tends to convince us that police violence is attributable to a few bad apples and not to the State, or that it is exceptional and that with "better" leaders the "militaristic drift" of the police could cease. All these assertions are contradicted by the history of police violence in France and by the very function of the State and its police force*.
According to international law, the use of force by states to protect their citizens from criminal acts must "meet the principles of necessity, proportionality, legitimacy, and non-discrimination." The police should only resort to this force as a last resort, when absolutely necessary to protect themselves or others from an imminent threat of death or serious injury. However, as Amnesty International and the LDH (Human Rights League) point out, many homicides attributable to the police worldwide do not meet this criterion.
The reality of police violence has long been obscured by its assimilation to "police misconduct"-that is, individual and isolated acts committed outside any legal framework, and reprehensible as such. (A frequent scenario is police intervention that results in the death of a person wrongly identified as a suspect.)
The association between "police violence" and "police misconduct" is, however, becoming less and less straightforward. Far from being on the fringes of the repressive system, many instances of police violence are in fact part of it: they are covered up by the government and the police hierarchy, who have authorized or incited them; they are supported by the "justice" system (from its investigators to its courts) - and they aim to prevent any challenge to the established order. Michel Kokoreff rightly observes that "state over-violence is not an accident, a sum of 'dysfunctions,' but a consciously decided and implemented strategy."
To try and create a diversion and stifle the scandal of a death, disinformation is widely orchestrated by those in power: lies aimed at tarnishing the victim's reputation or concealing the causes of death (for example, Nahel Merzouk allegedly drove straight at the police officer who murdered him on June 27, 2023 - a version refuted by dozens of videos), announcements about banning certain weapons or opening a "judicial inquiry"... Regarding police violence during social protests, Prime Minister Castaner in 2019 and Interior Minister Darmanin in 2023 justified it by citing the "extreme violence" of the demonstrators.
The repression of March 25, 2023, in Sainte-Soline is a textbook case: a barrage of tear gas grenades at the entrance, multiple "non-regulatory" shots fired at the demonstrators, leaks of information about Serge and Mickaël being flagged as potential security threats, and an investigation by The biased and incomplete IGGN announces new bogus investigations... the case is closed without further action. But many other episodes in French history have illustrated one or more aspects of what underlies the expression "police violence" (see the box "Was the police 'better' yesterday?").
The repression in Sainte-Soline
The public meeting organized on January 10, 2026, in Poitiers by Bassines non merci (No to Reservoirs) and Serge's parents was recorded. To watch the video: "Public meeting on the repression of Sainte-Soline on 01/10/26 in Poitiers" - https://youtu.be/4j-NL61eGYY?si=PQ-...
Furthermore, since police violence is present in totalitarian regimes as well as in representative democracies, under right-wing as well as left-wing governments (the modes of governance or political affiliation mainly vary its number and visibility[1]), the slogan "Down with the police state!" can be considered a pleonasm...
The police and the state are inseparable.
Since the Vichy government nationalized the police in France on April 23, 1941, its personnel, previously largely municipal employees, became civil servants under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior and the regional prefectures (who thus determine the arming of law enforcement and its use). And since then, state violence has been a growing phenomenon, even becoming commonplace when the level of social conflict incites those in power to resort to it.
"Marginalized" individuals, "deviants," or "foreigners" (particularly "Roma") have, of course, been subjected to specific forms of discrimination for ages. But the violence that targets people from former colonies (long labeled "of North African origin" by the media) or their descendants ("of immigrant origin") and the numerous crimes committed by law enforcement in working-class neighborhoods are largely explained by France's "colonial legacy." These neighborhoods and suburbs are the sites of the most frequent discrimination (2) and police violence-the sites of anti-"Arab" and anti-youth harassment that easily escalated into "ratonnade" (a term used to describe violent attacks against people by police) in the 1960s and 70s. And it is there that the strategies, tactics, and equipment of law enforcement, as well as curfews, are tested.
This was particularly evident under Sarkozy, first as Minister of the Interior and then as President, during the 2005 "banlieue" riots and the 2007 Villiers-le-Bel riots. The reorganization of the police to quell these riots was subsequently used to repress social movements. Then, the 2015 Islamist attacks allowed the government to exploit the terrorist threat to criminalize protesters by portraying them as "terrorists" to be treated as such. During the 2016 protests against the "labor law," the police used kettling to segment marches, targeted incursions into these kettling operations to extract protesters, harassment, and excessive use of tear gas grenades. But it was with the Yellow Vest movement that repression-both police and judicial-took an unprecedented leap since 1968. Often confronted with it for the first time in their lives, many yellow vests discovered on this occasion their belonging to the "dangerous classes". And the establishment of the "state of health emergency", linked to the Covid pandemic (2019-2020), further accentuated social control.
Today, for law enforcement, the goal is no longer to keep demonstrators at a distance but to engage directly with them-including during union "days of action"-with a view to "targeted arrests"; and, even when nothing happens, to harass the marches with repeated charges that can sow panic. "We are no longer dealing with missions of 'preserving public order,' but with something that falls under military logic," notes Kokoreff. "There are no longer adversaries, but enemies-or rather: any enemy whatsoever, anyone who can be hit in the head by a flash-ball round or a grenade, or be arrested."
The militarization of these so-called "guardians of peace" is presented by the government as a response to the demands of a "French population" ever more eager for security (5). In fact, a large part of this population, rather than being driven by anger or racism, is primarily indifferent to the mistreatment suffered by specific social groups (when they are not part of them) and to the repression of protesters: they only take an interest sporadically, when a shocking event (such as the videos showing the gendarmes firing directly at them in Sainte-Soline) brings them into the spotlight.
At the same time, protesters who equip themselves to protect against tear gas can be charged with concealing their faces, since the "anti-rioter law" of April 10, 2019; and this law also provides for "preventive" bans on protesting that call into question the right to do so.
Was the police force "better" yesterday?
No school textbook mentions the massacres perpetrated by the French army in Sétif, Ghelma, and Kherrata, Algeria, after May 8, 1945: the bloody episodes (including torture) of this undeclared war have been concealed or "forgotten" (1). Nor does any textbook mention the massacre of October 17, 1961, ordered in Paris by Police Prefect Papon (i.e., the State) - and officially recorded by him as two deaths, while hundreds of people were shot and thrown into the Seine.
On February 8, 1962, at the Charonne metro station in Paris, police killed nine people during a demonstration against the Algerian War and against the OAS, organized by left-wing parties and unions and banned by the same Prefect Papon. This "state massacre" resulted in a dismissal of the case in 1966, a decision upheld on appeal in 1967 (2).
During the 1968 student protests, which left seven dead and thousands injured, Paris Prefect Grimaud downplayed the police repression during the first "Night of the Barricades" (May 10). He justified the use of certain weapons (such as phosphorus grenades, banned by the UN, and chlorine bombs, used in 1914 and during the Algerian War) and the subsequent pogrom that followed the dismantling of the barricades by citing the presence of individuals unrelated to the student uprising, "guerrilla specialists." After the second "Night of the Barricades" (May 24), the government referred to "arms caches" among "extremists." Once the "Grenelle agreements" were negotiated with the unions, allowing them to regain control of the workers' movement (factory occupations and other forms of boss sequestration ceased), Interior Minister Marcellin restored "public order" with the "anti-vandalism law" of June 8, 1970: "leftists," union members, anti-nuclear activists, etc., were held responsible for "vandalism" in the actions in which they participated, political organizations were banned, demonstrations were repressed, publications were censored...
On July 31, 1977, Vital Michalon was killed by an offensive grenade during an anti-nuclear demonstration in Creys-Malville where a "powerful police deployment" had been put in place around the future Superphénix power plant (2,500 offensive grenades fired, about a hundred injured). The government tried to make people believe that Vital died of a heart attack, but the autopsy showed that his lungs had ruptured from the blast of the grenade. The complaint filed by Vital's parents was dismissed in 1980.
Following the assassination of Malik Oussekine in Paris on December 6, 1986, by motorcycle police, Public Prosecutor Jeol suggested that he had died in the hospital from kidney failure, when in fact he had died in a building lobby from the blows he received.
Rémi Fraisse was killed on October 26, 2014, by a stun grenade during a demonstration against a dam project in Sivens. The prosecutor suggested that his bag might have contained a Molotov cocktail. The successive lawsuits filed by Rémi's parents ended in 2020 with the case being dismissed (3). No police officer was prosecuted, and the prefect was not questioned.
1. The archives on the Algerian War, opened in the 1990s, were closed again in the 2020s.
2. The government was all the more protective of the police on this occasion because it needed them to defend itself against the OAS, and because the dead were members of the Communist Party or the CGT (therefore "Stalin's henchmen").
3. In 2023, the Toulouse Administrative Court ordered the State to compensate the Fraisse family, but declared that it had not committed any wrongdoing and that the police had acted "proportionately." It was only in 2025 that the State was found responsible for Rémi's death... by the European Court of Human Rights.
The function of police violence for those in power
Kokoreff seems surprised that "maintaining order" has led to the current "escalation of war," and he believes that at present it is no longer the politicians who direct the police, but the police who literally "control" the politicians. The idea that maintaining order and warlike repression are two distinct "missions" of the public force is, however, refuted by history, and the police institution's hold over the state is (still?) far from a given in France.
The police forces still include both elements (from the gendarmerie and the police) whose image remains fairly positive among those who have no dealings with them, and thugs with heavy-handed methods (from the BAC and "parallel police forces" in the style of the SAC[6]). However, the former increasingly resemble the not-so-bright "good cops" mocked by Brassens, and their practices are bringing them closer and closer to the latter. And, in the upper echelons, the lines are blurred. For example, Charles Pasqua-the Minister of the Interior from 1986 to 1995 who, along with his Minister Delegate for Security, Robert Pandraud, engaged in widespread police brutality-was a figure in the Resistance, a founding member of the Gaullist RPR party, but also of the SAC. As for Laurent Nuñez, the current Minister of the Interior, he was previously Director General of the DGSI (the intelligence service), then National Coordinator for Intelligence and Counterterrorism...
Police violence is deliberately employed by the proponents of capitalism to maintain a balance of power in their favor and a social climate conducive to achieving their economic objectives for maximum profit.
The history of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s is there to remind us of this reality (7):
This movement, which developed by carrying a "classic" ecological and anti-militarist critique, but also a revolutionary anti-capitalist one, was a thorn in the side of a state holding a monopoly on the production and distribution of nuclear energy and a nuclear industry considered a pillar of the capitalist economic system. Anti-nuclear actions hardened (sabotage or attacks against nuclear industry sites or individuals), and there was widespread local popular resistance to the construction of nuclear power plants in Plogoff, Chooz, and Golfech... But the promise made by "the left," on the eve of the 1981 presidential election, to organize "a major democratic debate on nuclear power" if it came to power, split a dynamic that had previously remained outside of political parties. While Mitterrand, once elected President, did not fulfill this promise of a "major debate" on nuclear power, a faction of environmentalists entered the institutional arena with the creation of the Green Party in 1984. Then, police repression and political tensions within the committees, between increasingly less anti-nuclear reformists and revolutionaries or proponents of political and social ecology, considerably weakened the movement - which is now almost nonexistent.
The discourse of the French state regarding its police practices is primarily propaganda aimed at obtaining the consent of the masses, or at least their lack of reaction to this violence - but also at preventing further damage to France's international image. This beautiful country has, in fact, been singled out for decades for police violence against young people in housing projects, migrants, or during social movements or protests in defense of common goods and territories, or even during the riots in Nouméa that left 14 dead. On May 1, 2023, before the UN Human Rights Council, Sabrine Balim, legal advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, nevertheless stated, without a hint of irony, that "the use of force[was]strictly regulated, controlled, and, in the event of misconduct, punished" in France; and that law enforcement officers were required to wear an individual identification number "in order to ensure the visibility and traceability of their actions" (8).
Amnesty laws enacted after wars and colonial repressions (9) are, for their part, a means of erasing the horrors, or at least of absolving the State of any responsibility for them. It is the victors who rewrite history, as we know.
Is police violence the preserve
of the right wing or the far right?
Those who believe the left is incapable of ordering police violence are either amnesiac or misinformed:
It was on the orders of a socialist (SFIO) Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch, that the workers' strikes of 1947-1948 were stopped by the army and that the repression was of exceptional magnitude: six dead, thousands injured and 3,000 dismissals among the strikers - but also cut family allowances, removals from the electoral lists, expulsions from the territory, etc. The Constitutional Council granted reparations to their descendants in... 2020.
It was another member of the SFIO (the party's general secretary), Guy Mollet, who, having become Prime Minister, requested and obtained on March 12, 1956, the vote granting "special powers" to the army to "pacify" Algeria: widespread use of military justice, legalization of the internment camps created in 1955, suspension of individual liberties...
The Ouvéa massacre in 1988 was ordered by President Mitterrand and his Prime Minister Chirac, both of whom were then candidates in the second round of the presidential election.
"Operation Caesar" at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to evacuate the ZAD (Zone to Defend) was carried out on October 16, 2012, by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault under the presidency of François Hollande, both members of the Socialist Party.
The mobilization against the "labor law" and the Nuit Debout movement, which largely represented the "left-wing" electorate, were repressed in 2016 by the government of the "socialist" Manuel Valls.
Etc.
Furthermore, is it really desirable that the "left-leaning" police unions (in particular the FASP, close to the Socialist Party) regain the dominant position they held until the 1980s, a position taken from them by the Alliance union (close to Sarkozy and the "Pasqua network," which claims 40,000 members out of 140,000 police officers)? This "rather left-leaning" police force did not restrain its baton blows in '68 any more than it prevented the assassinations of "young people from the suburbs" in the 1970s. The "fraternization" of CRS with striking miners in 1948 - partly explainable by regional recruitment - remained a rarity.
Can the police be reformed... or abolished without abolishing the State?
Chanting "Everybody hates the police" identifies a common enemy, but what is the point of such a slogan? Denouncing police violence does not necessarily imply questioning the existence of the police.
In the United States, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, sparked four nights of riots and looting in that city, and then in others. The Black Lives Matter movement highlighted the ineffectiveness of reforms implemented over the past century to combat police violence: the number of homicides of African Americans in the ghettos has not decreased (nearly a thousand per year), racism has not diminished, and relations between the police and certain segments of the population have not improved. These reforms have merely served to defuse protests against police violence. The Defund the Police movement now aims to weaken the police financially (by transferring a substantial portion of its funding to education, healthcare, and housing), disarm it (by banning certain intervention techniques and "less-lethal" weapons), and dissolve it, or at least "restructure" it. But in Minneapolis, the local police force was only dissolved for two weeks: it reappeared to deal with the protests while police violence continued.
The eight minutes during which Floyd agonized were filmed, sparking international outrage and protests. In France, they revived memories of Adama Traoré, who died in 2016 following his arrest with a prone restraint and chokehold: more than 20,000 people gathered in front of the Paris courthouse on June 2, 2020, to demand justice and truth for victims of police violence. The groups Désarmons-les (Let's Disarm Them) and Urgence notre police assassine (Our Police Are Murdering Us) have been seeking for years the disarmament of the police and the creation of a public body independent of the police and judicial institutions to investigate their practices.
The issue of police violence highlights the importance of activist memory: without generational transmission of what repression has been like in the past, we risk repeating misjudgments about it today. For example, it is not accurate to say that we have recently "taken" the precaution of going to demonstrations with protective gear against the effects of tear gas, as is commonly understood: it is a habit that we have "revived," because in the post-1968 era, clashes with the police were brutal. We prepared accordingly, we "chained ourselves" into the marches so that plainclothes police officers couldn't remove anyone (similarly, when we were seriously involved in activism, we didn't have address books)...
We also risk being deluded about the police's autonomy from the state - or believing that "the left" is capable of "reforming" the police so that they practice prevention and deterrence rather than repression (see the box "Is police violence the preserve of the right or the far right?").
The history of the police sheds light on its purpose, which is primarily to regulate the workforce: the police were structured in large industrialized cities, as well as during revolutionary periods, to defend the existing system. This history also shows that, when there is a risk of "unrest," maintaining order and military repression go hand in hand: during miners' strikes, during wars against colonial independence... or during the Yellow Vest movement, it was the army that was granted police powers.
In conclusion, the reality of police violence in France can only be grasped by examining what those in power expect from it and what the State represents.
Gwenola Ricordeau is quite right to write that, far from malfunctioning as is commonly believed, the police "function very well in terms of what is expected of them: protecting the State, the capitalist system, structural racism, and patriarchy." And Michel Kokoreff is right to remind us: "The State is not simply an instrument of coercion, but an instrument for producing and reproducing consensus. Its monopoly on physical and symbolic violence therefore presupposes consent to domination, which is reflected in the predominantly positive expression of support for the police or the justice system, which is above all an affirmation of principle regarding their legitimacy."
But does the production of security-related discourse and practices truly constitute, as Kokoreff suggests, the state's "new source of legitimacy" given its lack of economic legitimacy-"it is far too small for vast globalization and too large for regionalization"? In other words, unable to be a welfare state, is it a night-watchman state to preserve its sovereignty? In
any case, police violence is a tool of the economic exploitation system. Despite capitalist globalization, the slogan "National Police, militia of capital" remains relevant-just as social movements and strikes remain essential to overturning the established order.
The current strengthening of repression goes hand in hand with that of the state, as social control has been facilitated by the Covid pandemic and the rise of digital technology-which not only continues but does so with widespread public approval. With security being a central theme in all electoral programs, police violence will not be eliminated by voting, but by radically changing society.
Vanina
* This article continues the reflection begun in CA no. 355 (December 2025) concerning Sainte-Soline, and it draws in particular on Police Violence: Genealogy of State Violence by sociologist Michel Kokoreff (Textuel, 2021) and on an interview with him from December 21, 2020: lundimatin#268
Notes
1. Corruption is, likewise, present everywhere - but in dictatorships it is blatant at every level, whereas in "democracies" there is more care taken to maintain appearances.
2. The study conducted in 2009 by the Open Society Justice Initiative highlighted the control of individuals based on their physical appearance and clothing.
3. 11,000 tear gas canisters were fired during the evacuation of Notre-Dame-des-Landes between April 9 and 16, 2018, 8,000 during the third "Yellow Vest" protest alone (December 1, 2018).
4. Hundreds of serious injuries, two deaths - and 3,000 convictions, 1,000 incarcerations. See David Dufresne's website "Hello! Place Beauvau - this is to report an incident."
5. The same trend toward militarization can be found in municipal police forces (which are proliferating) and in the brigades of the RATP (Paris public transport authority) and the SNCF (French national railway company).
6. Among other shady operations, the Civic Action Service (Gaullist "private police") was founded in 1960 and dissolved in 1982. The Anti-Crime Brigade, for its part, was created in 1994.
7. See, for example, on lundimatin, "Back to the 70's: the fight against the Golfech nuclear power plant," March 1, 2017.
8. See "Repression, Deputy of Capital," CA 331, June 2023.
9. The Ouvéa assassinations "disappeared" through this channel.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4639
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Link: (en) France, OCL CA #357 - Lessons from History on Police Violence (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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