On the eve of a tenth day of mobilization against the pension reform, Tuesday March 28, Olivier Fillieule, professor of political sociology at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and researcher at the CNRS, analyzes the policies of maintenance of order deployed by the authorities. He is the author, with Fabien Jobard, of Disorder policy(ies). The police of the demonstrations in France (Threshold, 2020).
How would you characterize the policing strategy deployed during the demonstration against the pension reform of March 23?
Appeared around the movement against the Labor Law, deployed against the “yellow vests” in 2018-2019 and engraved in the marble of the national law enforcement plan 2020, the brutalization of interventions is today at the heart of the French strategy for maintaining order. The instruction is clear: prevent any phenomenon of lasting occupation of the public highway, dissuade citizens from demonstrating and circumvent without restraint small radicalized groups who believe that the street parade is no longer enough to make themselves heard.
To achieve this, the panoply is very wide: large-scale identity checks, diversion of police custody in order to prevent citizens from parading, untimely close gassings, physical violence against onlookers or against unarmed people on the ground, non-assistance to persons in danger, systematic sweepings, obstacles to the freedom to inform, judicial repression and recourse to the brigades for the repression of motorized violent actions (BRAV-M) and the anti-crime brigades (BAC), the practice of which is to policing what military band is to music. So many behaviors prohibited or strictly limited by law, which the power seems to care very little about.
Was the strategy for maintaining order different during the first demonstrations against the pension reform, which took place peacefully?
In the first weeks of the movement, an instruction of restraint and moderation prevailed: the mutilations and police violence of the sequence of “yellow vests” acted as a foil. But the passage of the pension reform bill was followed by a return to basics – a brutal policing strategy. Rather than reducing tension, this policy has contributed to amplifying disorder: faced with increased and largely illegitimate repression, protesters have multiplied illegalism.
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