There are supporters who reveal great excitement. The recent remarks of two senior officers of the Ministry of the Interior on the police and the prison are among these. And there is cause for concern. In The Parisian of this Monday, July 24, the prefect Frédéric Veaux, director general of the national police (DGPN), “considers that before a possible trial, a police officer has no place in prison, even if he may have committed serious faults or errors in the context of his work “. Laurent Nunez, former Secretary of State for the Interior and current Paris police chief, immediately endorsed this statement on Twitter. “I share the words of the DGPN,” he said. However, this statement made direct reference to the detention of a police officer from the Marseille anti-crime brigade (Bac), in a case of assault and battery on a 22-year-old young man, previously hit by an LBD shot while he was leaving work. An attack on the separation of powers “extremely serious”, estimated the union of the magistrature (classified on the left) and the Union of magistrates (USM, majority).
It is hard to imagine that the two police leaders took this position without notifying their supervisory authority, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin. What we imagine very well, on the other hand, is the link of this declaration with the significant emotion aroused by the imprisonment of the Marseille policeman. Several branches of the SGP Police FO Unit union have called for the application of “code 562”, which corresponds to the waiting position at the police station in internal jargon. Clearly, it is a question of practicing the work-to-rule, by dealing only with the most serious infractions. According to the Alliance union, several hundred police officers have taken sick leave.
In the spirit of Frédéric Veaux and Laurent Nunez, it is therefore a question of appeasing the troops. Startling nervousness of the executive. Reassuring the “police people” therefore appears more important than respecting the main principles of law, such as the independence of justice, and quite simply the reserve which is normally imposed on senior officials on current affairs. These two great servants of the State also know perfectly well that their assertion has no legal meaning: as for any indicted person, the choice of whether or not to keep a police officer in prison can only depend on the circumstances of the case. The individualization of judicial decisions is a principle of constitutional value. There can be no exception in principle on the pretext of being a police officer. Does the democratic crisis have to be deep for Veaux and Nunez to risk sending this purely political message? Because that is what it is all about.
“We are at war”
If the two leaders felt obliged to send this signal, it is because something has gone wrong in the relationship between the police hierarchy and the base. The balance of power has reversed. It is no longer the hierarchy that gives the orders and the base that executes, but the union representation that summons the leaders to rally their demands. During the yellow vests crisis, then more recently during the riots, the police became aware of their power. They are the last shield of the executive and intend to monetize it. The veiled threats of mutinies accumulate.
From November 2018, at the height of the yellow vests crisis, Alliance launched the operation “let’s close the police stations”. A call, already, to take into account only emergency calls. The police will get an exceptional bonus of 300 euros. In a leaflet from June 2020, Alliance, again, protests against police officers “already found guilty”, when in reality several investigations have just been launched. “National Police Alliance is not afraid to warn our authorities […] we will be attentive to any arbitrary decision and we are prepared to react if necessary”, warns the organization, which renewed the experience of the threatening document for the last time, on June 30. In the midst of a wave of urban riots, the union signs with the Unsa police a leaflet with martial overtones. “The police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it”, write the trade unionists. Irresponsible blackmail? Without a doubt, but that is another story. Now that the worm has entered the fruit, the government must live with it.
Obviously, Macron’s power is struggling to find the right distance in its relationship to the police. In this case, the executive could (and should?) sweep away union intimidation, reaffirm the pre-eminence of the rule of law over esprit de corps. Emmanuel Macron will have tried, timidly, to make a higher voice heard, this Monday, by affirming that “no one in the Republic is above the law”. But we understand that the anxiety of new urban disorders has taken over. The psychological revealer is particularly disturbing.
Perverse effect of “clearance”
Basically, the panic of the government at the slightest jolt of the police tells of the place taken by the maintenance of order in French political life. In this, the situation is the consequence of the mistrust that the political class inspires today, of the too weak authority of the government, but also a perverse effect of the putting into practice of the “clearance” theorized by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He himself probably hadn’t thought of it. Each election must be an opportunity to reject the political class in place and lead a citizen revolution, Mélenchon imagined in 2017. “Let them all go away”, was the title of one of his essays, published in 2010.
After his defeat, the founder of La France insoumise amended his theory. The “clearance” must not stop between each election. Because the President of the Republic was elected by a minority of citizens, his legitimacy is questionable. It is therefore necessary to encourage its putting in difficulty by the disorder. The citizen revolution gradually becomes an enthusiasm for the revolution as such. The rise of political violence automatically makes the police an essential player in French political life. And therefore a new barony, with its requirements. It is also disturbing that the feverishness of Calves and Nunez shines through a few days after the particularly virulent remarks of Mélenchon.
“I am of the age that allows me to remember the time when we thought we had time. If we failed in one election, we would meet again in the next one, and we were going to build, with the infinite patience of popular circles. Now, we have no more time”, he declared during a militant summit in Brussels, on July 18, before pleading for a seizure of power by the street rather than by the ballot box: “Only revolutionary and subversive action ive, which ensures the break with capitalism, can allow us to pull humanity out of the impasse”. A form of urban guerrilla warfare which would again place the police at the center of the system.