Is it really Didier Lallement? The man in front of us is not brittle, does not speak in a peremptory tone, is amused by objections, discusses with passion on French society, quotes Clemenceau or Trotsky, to which the title of his work, The necessary order (Robert Laffont), refers. He smiles, often, and sometimes it’s not a grin. A white beard of at least a week eats his face, giving him unexpected looks of a silver fox. The prefect no longer wears his uniform cap but a white shirt with fine blue stripes without a jacket. His new office, in the middle of a corridor on the third floor of the building at 20 avenue de Ségur, in Paris, headquarters of many services dependent on Matignon, has this characteristic impersonality of the French civil service. On the wall, a portrait of Emmanuel Macron, the flags of France and the European Union. “The mission is in particular to coordinate the coastguard function under the direct authority of the Prime Minister”, explains the 66-year-old senior official, when asked about his new position as Secretary General for the Sea. important supervision, which has not yet succeeded in making him totally forget his previous experience, the strongest of his career. Between March 2019 and July 2022, he was the face of the order in Paris, even in France.
“I took it seriously for three years so I wanted to tell what I experienced”, admits Didier Lallement, who did not lose his outspokenness by changing assignments. His book, a game of questions and answers with Jean-Jérôme Bertolus, former head of the political department of France Info, who does not hesitate to ask angry questions, is intended to be without pretense. His relations with Emmanuel Macron, the Ministers of the Interior, Anne Hidalgo, the management of the maintenance of order… the prefect does not evade any difficult subject. He tells of his astonishment at the radicalism of the yellow vests, whose profile clashes with that of the usual ultra-left activists. “They are people”, he repeats several times. We understand “simple people”, that is to say not agitators hardened for a long time in struggles against the established order. “We regularly arrested thugs. It was not always young people. There are a lot of thirty-year-olds, or forty-somethings, respectable fathers who break in before going for a walk with their dog. The Yellow Vests, it’s not the revolt of youth, it’s not a moment in life that passes when you get older, like after 1968. It’s the irruption of a part of the middle class into violence “, he writes.
From the first days, the prefect decided to use his reputation as a “bad guy”, resulting in particular from his time at the prefecture of Bordeaux, where he had threatened to “hang certain officials from a butcher’s hook”, an expression he assume. “It’s my rough side,” he smiles. Surprise, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Christophe Castaner, willingly let him embody this character, stepping aside for his benefit during his first press conference with the cap. “Suddenly, he gives me the floor and comes down from the podium. I knew I had to speak, but I was surprised by this dramatization. The objective was for me to embody the providential man A bit excessive role!”, remembers the prefect, yet not unhappy to play this role of “severe father”, as he puts it funny.
“At any time, you can be attacked”
The senior official quickly takes control of the prefecture’s command room on demonstration days, with… the sound of BFMTV in his left earpiece. “What our fellow citizens see are not the units on the ground, even less the command room: they are the images of the news channels or social networks,” he explains. When the cameras show a garbage can burning, the prefect immediately sends a team of firefighters on motorcycles to put it out: “Stopping small fires means drying up the inevitable images and comments on ‘Paris on fire and blood””. The turning point occurred in his eyes on May 1, 2019. That day, the police suffered in the face of the thugs, but held on. “A tactical victory”, he assures. The movement of the yellow vests will never be the same again.
Don’t go telling Didier Lallement that the dangers of the street have disappeared. “Hate and violence are gaining ground every day,” worries the man who led the intelligence services of the four departments of the inner Parisian crown for three years. The prefect is convinced that a “next detonator” could lead to new overflows. The drop in delinquency during his term of office? “You have to be honest, it’s partly due to covid. In reality, violence is rising throughout society,” he evacuates. The life of the police? “Hell. At any time, you can be attacked.” The senior official disputes the idea of systemic police violence and suggests putting certain charges in perspective, including in the least defensible cases. Thus, about a policeman who declared: “A bicot like that, it does not swim”, after having fished out an Egyptian from the Seine, at Ile-Saint-Denis, he is to say the least indulgent: “Of course, the remark is reprehensible but it is necessary to put things in their context. These police officers speak in private, they compensate after having plunged into the Seine to save this person. I do not put on the same level this sentence and the act of bravery. Who would have had the guts to jump?”
Didier Lallement also reveals that “in Paris, 1 crime out of 2 is committed by a foreigner, many of whom are in an irregular situation. They are responsible for 90 to 95% of pickpocketing”. A problem to which he does not really imagine a solution without major legal reform, no more than concerning the open scenes of crack, recently dismantled at Porte de la Villette. “What is the alternative? To play the fathers of virtue and disperse the drug addicts? Send them to all the neighborhoods to scream and attack passers-by everywhere, when we no longer tolerate the spectacle of deviance?”, opposes the prefect in his book.
A man of honor, the senior official proposed to resign the day after the Stade de France fiasco, on May 28, 2022. This was not the plan of the strong men of the government, who imagined him to manage the next social movement against pension reform. The Secretary General for the Sea makes little mystery of having moderately enjoyed wearing the disaster hat alone, while the organization of the event was officially the responsibility of the interministerial delegation to major sporting events. When the stadium announcer announces the delay of the match, Didier Lallement is unaware of the extent of the unrest in progress, for lack of having been warned by his closest collaborator, who has abandoned the security PC. “What I didn’t know was that my chief of staff had in fact left the PC at the start of the evening to watch the match from the stands. He was therefore no longer in a position to give me reliable information”, writes the prefect. On the responsibilities of his superiors over the past three years, Didier Lallement will say nothing. Not the kind of house, prefect cap on the head or not.