It’s the (very late) end of a summer soap opera. The Elysée and the government agreed this Thursday, October 31, on the appointments of the bosses of the police and the gendarmerie. Prefect Louis Laugier will lead the country’s 155,000 police officers; General Hubert Bonneau will command the 150,000 French gendarmes. The postponement of these extremely strategic appointments from one Council of Ministers to another ended up arousing sarcasm and exacerbating the war of succession around these two positions, which had started well before the formation of Michel Barnier’s government.
“Finally!”, a senior gendarmerie official and an important police chief exclaimed to AFP in unison. Last week, another police official worried that the summer series could turn into “an autumn soap opera.” The affair was beginning to be delicate, apart from the fact that it reflected tensions between the Elysée and the government in this period of cohabitation: it blocked a whole series of important appointments, such as that of the boss of Ofast, the dedicated office in the fight against drugs, and those of prefects.
There was a deadline, at the end of September, the date on which the two incumbents, Frédéric Veaux (police) and Christian Rodriguez (gendarmerie), left their post to retire after having been extended due to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Paris. It took one more month for the Elysée and the government to make their choice on Louis Laugier, current prefect of Isère, and General Hubert Bonneau, head of the Brittany gendarmerie and the Western defense zone.
In two separate messages posted on the social network X, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau congratulated the two winners, praising their “competence”. And insisted on the fact that they had been appointed “on (his) proposal”. The two men were not the names chosen by his predecessor, Gérald Darmanin. Louis Laugier, who has the particularity of having also been approached for the gendarmerie, is not a former top cop of the PJ like his predecessor, but he knows the house well having held high positions there, particularly in human resources. .
“Eye of Moscow”
Aged 59, this native of Paris was confronted in Isère with the recent wave of murders linked to drug trafficking in Grenoble and its surrounding area. A subject that Bruno Retailleau wants to establish as a “national cause”. The Grenoble prosecutor, Eric Vaillant, says of him that he has “an excellent vision of the issues”. He graduated from the Saint-Cyr military school, like General Hubert Bonneau. Both come from the same promotion, that of “General Callies”.
General Bonneau is the second former boss of the GIGN, the elite unit of the gendarmerie, to access the position of director general of the gendarmerie, after Denis Favier, an icon of this body. His period at the head of GIGN (2014-2017) will be marked in January 2015 by the hunt for the Kouachi brothers, Chérif and Saïd, which ended in Dammartin-en-Goële where the two attackers of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were shot down. Aged 57, he is originally from Brest. Since September 2022, he has been commander of the gendarmerie of the Brittany region, as well as of the Western defense and security zone. Upon arriving at Place Beauvau, Bruno Retailleau refused to endorse the choices of his predecessor, deciding to audition the candidates himself and to solicit others.
Alexandre Brugère, 37, who was Gérald Darmanin’s chief of staff, intended to become the boss of the police officers. He was appointed prefect in 2022. Many did not believe in his chances of obtaining the post of DGPN due to his proximity to the former minister. This amounted to “naming the eye of Moscow”, summed up one commissioner. Alexandre Brugère is expected to become prefect of Hauts-de-Seine.
On the gendarmerie side, the position of general director seemed likely to fall to General Xavier Ducept, boss of the gendarmerie of the Ile-de-France region, supported by General Rodriguez. But here too, time reshuffled the cards and Bruno Retailleau’s choice fell on General Bonneau.