“Most of us who’ve lost an eye were hit near the cheekbone or temple,” says Jérôme Rodrigues, “at which point, that section of your skull shatters. Your cranium is then reconstructed using screws and titanium plates. I was fortunate in that I had no skeletal injury. The officer responsible aimed directly at my eyeball, which burst.” He pauses. “Coffee?”
We’re talking in the kitchen of his studio flat in a quiet village 25 miles north of Paris. Rodrigues, 40, the most engaging and articulate of the prominent gilets jaunes – he doesn’t appreciate being called a “leader” – hands me a grey object roughly as large as a roll-on deodorant: a 40mm calibre projectile from a weapon known as an LBD 40, popularly referred to as a Flash-Ball. Its rigid outer casing, weight (60g) and speed of trajectory (360kph) makes it absurdly euphemistic to refer to it as a “rubber bullet”.
Rodrigues was filming on his mobile phone when he was blinded by an LBD in the Place de la Bastille on 26 January, during the eleventh “Acte”, as the gilets jaunes call their Saturday demonstrations. Acte I took place on 17 November 2018. The first thing you hear on Rodrigues’ recording is the launching of a stun grenade – the widely feared GLI-F4, which is packed with TNT and has blown off the limbs of several protestors. A second later comes the sound of the LBD discharging, a noise similar to the popping of a Champagne cork. After several weeks of accompanying the gilets jaunes both sounds are familiar to me. It’s come to the point these days that when I hear the word “Paris”, the sensual associations the French capital is supposed to evoke – the scent of Guerlain, Gitanes and the sound of the street accordion – have long since been supplanted by the astringent taste of teargas, fumes from burning car tyres and the scream of police sirens.
“As you can hear,” says Rodrigues, replaying the footage, “just before I am hit I’m telling my friends to keep moving, so they’re not sitting ducks.”
When Rodrigues falls to the ground, his mobile hits the pavement but continues to record. People call for the street medics – the volunteers, mainly off-duty nurses, who tend to the wounded gilets jaunes. A woman screams.
“They’ve taken his eye out,” somebody shouts. “His eyeball has gone.”
Some who are unfamiliar with the robust methods of the Compagnies Républicaines De Securité (CRS), the French riot police, might accuse Rodrigues of paranoia when he talks about being cynically targeted.
“They shot directly at my eye,” says Rodrigues, who, before he was mutilé (a word formerly associated with soldiers “mutilated” on the battlefield, it’s one you hear a lot when conversation turns to the gilets jaunes) had been working as a plumber. Even before he was shot, he had been interviewed regularly on television and with his then full beard, now trimmed, was already a unmistakable figure.
“One shot,” he says, “one victim. At first the authorities denied they had even fired an LBD. Every discharge has to be logged within an hour.”
By chance the veteran French war reporter Florent Marcie, famous for his documentary work in Iraq and Afghanistan, was close to Rodrigues when he was hit. “Florent was using professional recording equipment. He visited me in hospital. He said, ‘I don’t have images of the precise moment they fired at you, but I do have the sound.” The television channel TF1 broadcast his report. Twenty-four hours later, a police spokesman conceded that they had fired an LBD, but had “mistaken the time of the shooting”.
Marcie, who has also worked in Syria, Bosnia and Chechnya, emerged from those conflicts unscathed, but while filming in Paris – three weeks before Rodrigues was blinded – he had himself been struck by a Flash-Ball, which blew a hole in his face an inch below his right eye. “Florent,” Rodrigues continues, “talked to me about working in theatres of war before he began filming us in Paris. It occurred to me that I’d never put those words together. War and Paris: two nouns I had never imagined I’d hear spoken in the same breath. I looked at him and I thought, what are you doing here? A war reporter? In Paris? What have we come to?”
Rodrigues became the 20th gilet jaune to have been “borgne” (the French, unlike the English, have a special adjective to describe being blinded in one eye).
“Twenty-four people,” he tells me, “have lost an eye. Five have had a limb blown off. Thousands have been injured: their jaws broken, all their teeth knocked out. An unknown number have been shot in the back. What greater threat is there to a riot squad than an unarmed man or woman who is running away? Five people have been shot in or around the groin. One has had a testicle amputated.”
The LBD (lanceur de balle de défense) is a high-precision, Swiss-manufactured weapon equipped with laser-pointer sights. Though categorised as “sublethal”, its potential to maim and kill, especially if pointed (as it should never be) at the upper body, is such that it is used in almost no other European country. The GLI-F4 stun grenades, which contain 25g of TNT and explode, before delivering CS gas, at a deafening 165 decibels, are also used only in France. President Emmanuel Macron and his minister of the interior, Christophe Castaner, have ignored repeated demands for the abandonment of the use of both weapons, from organisations including the United Nations, the European Parliament, the Council Of Europe, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Reporters Sans Frontières. At the time of writing, both weapons continue to be used by the CRS. The French government’s sole concession has been to say that they will stop using stun grenades when stocks run out.
There are major misconceptions concerning the gilets jaunes on the north side of The Channel, I tell Rodrigues. Many in Britain believe that the movement has stopped entirely.
“Absolutely untrue,” Rodrigues replies. “If anything, the anger is mounting.” (The day after we speak, there were 30 serious incidents of wounding in the southern city of Montpellier alone, one so severe that the victim was initially reported to have died.) In Paris, numbers of demonstrators are down since the government took the decision to close off the Champs-Elysées to the gilets jaunes every Saturday, but the outrage at the injuries inflicted by the riot police (who may be CRS or another force, termed gendarmes mobiles; both wear a uniform that wouldn’t look out of place in Star Wars) is finally beginning to be addressed in the mainstream news.
The widely mistrusted CRS (which formed in late 1944, partly recruited from the ranks of the detested GMR, the force used by the Vichy regime to counter the French Resistance) are complemented by a group of plain-clothes enforcers, the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC), who you see mingling with the gilets jaunes. The BAC, in their conduct and appearance, resemble nothing so much as the less conciliatory type of Millwall supporter.
I tell Rodrigues that many observers in Britain are perplexed about how a whole movement can have been mobilised by what is widely understood here to be irritation at the rising price of diesel.
“What the gilets jaunes represent,” he says, “is universal. What are we asking for? For people to earn a salary that allows them to eat properly and put a roof over their kids’ heads; basic provision for the unemployed; an end to this obscene situation where people are left on hospital trolleys through a lack of medical staff; the abolition of extortionate prices for privatised gas and electricity. We have a word for this vision. It’s called humanity.”
In the several demonstrations I attended, beginning in late March of this year, the common message from the gilets jaunes was not so much a questioning of their own disillusion with the French state, as bewilderment that the British – who they understand to be suffering similar privations in the form of food banks, deteriorating healthcare and charges for basic utilities – are not just as furious as they are.
Paris’ Montparnasse Station, on the morning of 1 May, was the assembly point for a workers’ day march dominated by the gilets jaunes, where numbers were well in excess of 40,000. In a gesture that was unsporting even by their own standards, the CRS surrounded the gathering demonstrators, who were in festive mood, blocked off all exits, then teargassed us before we had even set off. (In the words of one retired CRS officer, speaking off the record: “If you resort to using teargas, that is already an admission of defeat.”)
One of the people choking from the fumes that day was Françoise, a woman in her late sixties from the eastern town of Belfort. She told me that half her meals consisted of bread, water and coffee and that she was “frightened and ashamed” at the thought that her children might discover how she lived. In England, she asked, were there people struggling? I told her about the food banks. “Are they out protesting?” she asked. “Why not?”
Some might be surprised to see someone of her age attending what promised to be a fairly intimidating event. “You don’t have to be young to be in the street,” she said. “And you don’t have to be in the street to get hurt. Look at that lady from Marseille.” (Zineb Redouane, 80, was killed in Marseille in December 2018; she was trying to close her shutters when she was struck in the face by a teargas grenade.)
By coincidence, an hour after that conversation, I saw a group of middle-aged women who had chosen to while away the public holiday by taking drinks on their fourth-floor balcony and watching the gilets jaunes proceed down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. They were interrupted when a teargas grenade – fired, you can only assume, by a CRS marksman blessed with a mischievous sense of humour – exploded on the side of their building, a few metres away from them.
The massive deployment of riot police does seem to have put an end to the serious damage to property, such as the torching of Fouquet’s brasserie on the Champs-Elysées on 16 March. Such actions are usually precipitated by “black bloc” activists – young anticapitalists who have borrowed the tactics and sombre dress code from groups that have led protests in Berlin and London since the Eighties. At the gilets jaunes Actes in Paris, the black bloc represent a small minority. The gilets jaunes themselves are, with the very occasional exception, not confrontational, predominantly white but ethnically mixed, of all ages and comprising a fair balance of men and women. Their attitudes towards the sprinkling of black bloc activists vary, but most are sympathetic. “We see them as protection,” Rodrigues told me, “against the police.”
In the weeks I was out with the protestors, the most threatening experience I encountered was to find myself in a group of gilets jaunes close to the Place de la Bastille and having to flee down a side street to escape around 20 CRS who were charging at us for reasons that were unclear. Street medics are singled out by the CRS: I’ve seen them robbed of their protective eye masks, verbally abused and, in one instance, struck on the head. In most cities, when things get intense, an international press card will get you to the calmer side of a police line. Here, it’s a matter of the mood of the officers in the cordon.
I was present at Acte XXIII on 24 April, when the CRS kettled (the French use the phrase la nasse, literally “keepnet”) thousands of us in the Place de la République. For two hours they lobbed in teargas grenades, occasionally launching baton charges. Gaspard Glanz, a freelance cameraman sympathetic to the gilets jaunes, gesticulated at a CRS officer and was dragged away in handcuffs. It’s common for riot police to remove the unique identifying number they are required to display on the breast of their uniform. “Things can get lost,” one said, explaining what had happened to his ID patch.
I soon stopped taking along an eye mask: they are routinely confiscated by the police and there’s a general perception that wearing protective equipment makes you a more interesting target. I never wore a yellow vest at a demonstration (aside from anything else, even having one at a demonstration now enables the police to fine you €135 should they so wish) and, like most of the print media, I soon discarded my press armband.
“There are two groups singled out for special treatment, the street medics and the media,” said David Dufresne, one of France’s most distinguished journalists. Dufresne is a leading authority on French policing and cofounded the highly respected French news site Mediapart. “People have had recording equipment smashed, memory cards snapped and have been beaten and shot at with LBDs. Reporters Sans Frontières has documented well over 100 cases of journalists who have had serious problems. The prevailing climate in the police,” he added, “is particularly hostile to the press.”
The gilets jaunes are no angels: one afternoon in late May I sat in a café opposite the main police headquarters with the movement’s most prominent feminist activist, Sophie Tissier. Tissier, who has criticised some gilets jaunes for excessive machismo, showed me film of herself being slapped by a male comrade she had somehow irritated. Footage of the violence on the Champs-Elysées in the early spring speaks for itself. But in the time I spent on the streets of Paris, the only physical aggression I witnessed was dispensed by the forces of law.
The gilet jaune movement began on 24 October 2018, when Ghislain Coutard, a truck driver from Narbonne, south of Montpellier, stuck in traffic and angered by his conditions of work and, specifically, increased tax on diesel, posted a rant live on Facebook. As a choice of symbol the high-vis jacket was inspired. They are everywhere: since 2008 every French motorist has been required to have one in their vehicle. They’re cheap and – unlike black, brown or red shirts – are associated with safety and wellbeing rather than insurrection.
Coutard was not a born activist and these days his Facebook page contains posts offering sports cars for sale and that clip of a dog playing Jenga. If there’s one thing that unites the current gilets jaunes, it’s a detestation of Macron and Castaner. The notion that Macron may deem it legitimate to teargas, beat and maim civilians is confirmed, in the minds of most protestors, by the notorious YouTube clip that shows the president’s then deputy chief of staff, Alexandre Benalla, wearing a borrowed police helmet, assaulting a woman and beating a man on 1 May 2018 outside a café on the Left Bank. (Benalla was dismissed but was discovered, seven months later, still to be in possession of two official diplomatic passports and has faced no criminal charges.)
“You watch Alexandre Benalla in that video,” Jérôme Rodrigues told me, “beating someone’s head in. He’s not even a policeman. What’s he doing there in uniform? And what’s he doing today? Strolling around, enjoying his life. Who is Emmanuel Macron to lecture me on morality? If you’re a good person, with leadership skills, your conduct and the conduct of those close to you should be exemplary. France has a president who does what the hell he feels like. This sense of arrogance and entitlement has seeped into national institutions, such as the police. There is no opposition other than us. And the media are on his side.”
Macron and Castaner have remained stubbornly unapologetic on the subject of alleged police misconduct. On 2 June, Castaner’s deputy, Laurent Nuñez, was despatched to defend the government on the RTL television show Le Grand Jury. “We have no regrets about the policing of these demonstrations,” he said. “Just because someone’s hand has been torn off or a person has been blinded in one eye doesn’t mean that the police did anything wrong.”
Before I ever met a gilet jaune, I’d developed an unflattering view of the movement, having read deeply unsympathetic assessments by French reporters such as Jean Quatremer. Brussels correspondent of the liberal-left newspaper Libération, Quatremer has described them as “a bunch of dumb rednecks... looters, thugs, anti-republicans, anti-Semites, racists and homophobes”.
(“Me, an anti-Semite?” Rodrigues replies, when I mention this. “Here,” he adds, handing me a photograph of a prisoner wearing concentration-camp stripes, “is my great-grandfather at Mauthausen-Gusen.”)
It seemed odd that, give or take a spot of looting, having followed the movement on the ground over a period of months I never encountered any behaviour to support Quatremer’s view.
I mention this to French television journalist Paul Moreira, head of the film production company Premières Lignes. Moreira, who has shot significant footage of the gilets jaunes, had just returned from filming an interview with Steve Bannon in Rome. In Moreira’s documentary, which demonstrates the American’s close links with Marine Le Pen, Bannon is effusive in his praise of the gilets jaunes, presumably in the hope that they could help him destabilise the European Union. The gilets jaunes are, said Bannon, “the most decent and honourable people in the world”. His preoccupation with immigration, I suggest to Moreira, does not appear to be one the movement shares. I never heard the issue mentioned once.
“In Paris,” Moreira tells me, “the far right was swiftly expelled from the ranks. From the start certain people were calling the yellow vests fascists. You get no hint of that if you actually go out on the street and start talking to them. Pretty much every time a journalist really engages with them, they develop a feeling of empathy.”
That said, not every encounter between the gilets jaunes and press reporters has been so congenial. In Toulouse, in November 2018, Jean-Wilfrid Forquès was working for BFM TV. The channel is strongly supportive of Macron and Forquès had, accordingly, joined the march protected by bodyguards. He was obliged to take cover in a store. “Twenty people chased me. They were frothing at the mouth,” Forquès recalls, “and shouting, ‘Look: it’s another tosser from Macron’s channel.’”
In France, the most assiduous chronicler of the fortunes of the gilets jaunes has been David Dufresne. Addressing the views of Jean Quatremer, Dufresne tells me, “This attitude that the great unwashed are somehow not worthy of people like us: are they insane? I worked for Libération. That made me furious.”
Dufresne has become the gold standard on the movement in general and on police violence in particular. It’s a peculiar development in that at the end of last year this writer (whose books include an insightful social history based on the Belgian singer Jacques Brel and a definitive history of French policing) found himself putting his literary career on hold, overtaken by outrage.
“It happened late in 2018,” says Dufresne. “I’d been looking at these images of wounded gilets jaunes on the internet and... I was just staggered. They were so shocking – unspeakably gruesome – and yet absolutely ignored by the media.”
“It’s funny,” I say, “because, as soon as you hear someone say, ‘You won’t see this in the mainstream media,’ you tend to dismiss them as a crank.”
“You do, but on occasions I’m afraid it’s just true. So on 3 December I sent out the first tweet addressed to @Place_Beauvau [the official Twitter account of the Ministry Of The Interior].” (Place Beauvau is the address of Christophe Castaner’s headquarters, across the road from the Elysée Palace.)
Dufresne scrutinised, documented and verified each instance of police violence. Each “notification” was assigned a number and, where possible, accompanied by film or photographs, then tweeted to the Ministry. At time of writing, his notifications are approaching 900. Many of the pictures and video clips are, as Dufresne says, horrific. His refusal to embellish his messages with comment or opinion only magnifies their impact; “allo @Place_Beauvau”, the phrase with which he starts each tweet, has become a national institution.
“My statistics,” Dufresne tells me, “have never been disputed. You know the figures: 24 eyes lost, five limbs blown off. Before the gilets jaunes, there had been 31 such instances since 1998. So Macron’s France, in six months, has mutilated almost as many people as in the last 20 years. Say that publicly and, trust me, you find yourself immediately attacked. You are ‘against the police’. You are ‘an enemy of the republic’. Untrue in my case. I want the police to represent the ideals of the republic. A duty in which it is failing conspicuously.”
To meet the wounded mentioned in Dufresne’s numbered Twitter announcements is an experience not easily forgotten. People such as Lola Villabriga (notification #159), now 19, who was shot in the face by a Flash-Ball in Biarritz at an anti-G7 demonstration on 18 December, resulting in a triple fracture of the jaw, which has required surgeons to reconstruct her face. “I was standing on a bench, filming the people,” the shy and softly spoken student explains, “when I was hit. I didn’t think that sort of thing could happen, not to me, not in Biarritz.”
Vanessa Langard (#154), aged 34, tells me how she was employed as a carer for her grandmother before she attended a gilet jaune demonstration with three friends on the Champs-Elysées on 15 December 2018. Like most seriously wounded LBD victims she is now unable to work. “We saw the CRS,” Langard says, “and we thought we’d better keep away from them. So we walked away for about two minutes. Then I was hit in the face by a Flash-Ball.” She suffered a brain haemorrhage and, after multiple operations, still suffers from lapses of memory and poor co-ordination. She is blind in her left eye. “My friend thought I was dead,” she says. “She’s traumatised for life.” When Langard first looked in a mirror, she says, she “burst into tears. I thought, ‘How are you going to live?’ It was horrendous. My dad was a fireman. My grandfather was a police officer. I didn’t attack anyone. I didn’t insult anyone. I just walked.” As she puts it, what she experienced, “goes against everything I was ever brought up to believe, that you should help people”.
Langard, who lives on the southern outskirts of Paris, speaks to me wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. Before her injury, she says, she “used to love jewellery and make-up. I don’t wear the make-up I used to and I don’t wear the kind of clothes I used to. If I’d done something wrong, it would be easier to understand. But I didn’t deserve this.” Neutral observers, as she remarks, “have said again and again that police shouldn’t use LBDs. Nobody takes the slightest bit of notice. We are like specks of dust. We don’t exist for them.”
One to one, the CRS can be quite approachable. An officer told me, off the record, that the majority of his friends in the service had little appetite for the duties they are being asked to perform, “especially struggling with over 30kg of uniform and equipment in this heat”. Castaner’s Interior Ministry, at the last count, gave the numbers of injured as 2,448 gilets jaunes and 1,797 police. While it’s unquestionable that officers have been hurt, the notion that grotesque injuries have been inflicted more or less equally on both sides – one armed to the teeth and heavily protected, the other defenceless – seems improbable to say the least. The police, as any gilet jaune will tell you, are urged to report every scratch, bruise and even the temporary deafness brought on by the sound of their own munitions.
“We are never offered a detailed breakdown of the seriousness of police injuries,” Dufresne tells me. “What is certain is that no officer has lost an eye or a limb. If they had, Castaner would have paraded them in front of the media as a matter of urgency.”
Suicide rates among French riot police are now at a level that threatens to make 2019 the worst year on record. A report issued in April by one national police body, the DGPN, indicates that officers are killing themselves at a rate of one every four days. Thomas Toussaint of the UNSA Police union says that the suicide figures represent a “massacre” of officers who are working out of dilapidated police stations and who are inadequately supported, financially and psychologically. It’s common for CRS to get leave on only one weekend in five, a situation not helped by the gilets jaunes’ weekly protests. Demonstrators carry placards with slogans such as “Don’t Kill Yourselves: Join Us.”
English riot squads may be far from perfect, but the CRS looked, to me, like amateurs by comparison. Kettling thousands of people in a vast square such as the Place de la République, for instance, is a tactic that seems simply bewildering. The predictable result was panic and yet more violence.
I was present, I tell Dufresne, at the closing stages of Acte XXV, on May Day, when the official march, heading for the Place d’Italie, was heavily attacked by teargas. A group of gilets jaunes, half blind from the fumes and suffering from acute breathing difficulties, fled into the grounds of a hospital, La Pitié-Salpêtrière. As they approached the building they were chased and beaten with batons. Some entered the premises. Anyone unfortunate enough to have any experience of teargas will understand the impulse to enter a building that contains not only clean air but, very probably, medical staff and equipment. That incident happened at four in the afternoon. By eight o’clock, Didier Lallement, Paris’ chief of police, was being filmed at the hospital asserting that gilets jaunes had attacked gravely ill patients in a resuscitation room.
“Actually,” says Dufresene, “three of them were there: Lallement, Castaner and Nuñez, his deputy. At 10.30 that evening I posted the first videos (one filmed by a nurse) demonstrating that nothing of the kind had occurred. These people were simply trying to escape the teargas. The next morning, television channels were still repeating Castaner’s version, which was pure fiction. It took them 24 hours to start asking questions and that is simply incredible.”
Underpinning the riots of May 1968, which were considerably larger and more violent than the gilets jaunes’ demonstrations, there was at least a semblance of strategic ambition – if not a coherent plan – in the form of a fragile alliance between students and trade unions. That movement did appear, albeit briefly, to have the potential to overthrow the government, when Charles De Gaulle boarded a helicopter and fled to West Germany for a couple of days at the end of that month. The gilets jaunes, by contrast, are a disparate force unified by no more than a visceral dislike of the president and his regime.
What they also seem to lack, by contrast with the rebels of 1968, is an intellectual dimension and, in particular, a writer, or writers, who believe the protests could mutate into a force capable of delivering real change and who have the wit and the necessary influence to deliver this message to a mass readership.
Step forward, Juan Branco. His new book, Crépuscule (“Twilight”), a savage critique of the Macron government and a salute to the gilet jaune movement, is likely to be the work that defines this period. Crépuscule spent weeks at No1 in Amazon France’s bestseller list. It has been downloaded, in various forms, around a million times and has had sales approaching 100,000 hard copies. Crépuscule will be republished as a Livre De Poche paperback this autumn.
Branco is an improbable advocate for a populist movement given his age – 29 – and the fact that he was raised at the epicentre of French privilege. His CV is one that would be difficult to render credible in fiction. As a lawyer, Branco has served as a close advisor to Julian Assange and was formerly employed by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. At 23, he was an advisor to Laurent Fabius (then France’s minister of foreign affairs and previously a socialist prime minister), before completing a PhD at Yale. He represented his father, Portuguese film producer Paulo Branco, in the latter’s acrimonious dispute with Terry Gilliam following their doomed collaboration in the attempted 2016 incarnation of the film finally released last year as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Juan Branco has also found time to report on conflict in the Central African Republic and has achieved a top 20 world ranking in the professional sport of equestrian endurance.
He is a regular at such dazzlingly unaffordable Parisian establishments as the Café De Flore in the Latin Quarter. As he shakes hands when we meet in one of that neighbourhood’s slightly more modest cafés, I get the vague sense that I am not dealing with a man plagued by self doubt. “I like Juan,” one French journalist told me. “Even if I do suspect that he sees himself as a cross between Che Guevara and Jesus Christ.”
“I’m a traitor to my class,” says Branco, who attended prestigious institutions such as the Ecole Normale Supérieure and grew up in a house where the actress Catherine Deneuve was a regular dinner guest. With people like her around, “It’s as well, if you open your mouth, to have something of interest to say.”
The lawyer, who, as well as Crépuscule, recently published another book, called Against Macron, has become the president’s Moriarty. “The gilets jaunes,” he argues, “are not so much about money as they are about Macron.” The president’s defining role, he believes, is as an enabler of oligarchs.
“Emmanuel Macron is an arriviste. He was fascinated by the [privileged] world he was trying to get into. Now that he’s there, he’s trapped. There is no way out for him. Even if his presidency ended today, it would be impossible for him to get a normal life back.”
The gilets jaunes, Branco argues, “are about rebuilding democracy by allowing equal weight to all opinions and ignoring the power of vested interests”.
Given that numbers attending the demonstrations are unquestionably down, I ask if he seriously believes France is at a moment of potential revolution.
“I believe so, yes. This is a lull in the battle. The important confrontation is yet to come.”
I ask what form that revolution would take. (It’s hard to detect any hint of the usual signs of impending regime change, such as mass defections from the army and the police.)
“I don’t know how it will happen, but I’m sure that it will. Someone needs to offer something to the people, something concrete. We need to avoid the mistakes of the Seventies: nihilism and violence that lead us nowhere.” Macron’s government, Branco believes, “didn’t want to give a political response to a social movement. Instead, they moved to repress it by any means possible. It’s a miracle,” he adds, “that there have not been more deaths.”
On this last point, at least, few disagree.
On the first Sunday in June, in the Place de la Bastille, I join Jérôme Rodrigues, who’s taking part in a small march in tribute to the gilets jaunes who have been maimed. There are a few French journalists here: David Dufresne and his friend Christophe Dettinger. (If you really want to give yourself sleepless nights, you might visit Dettinger’s site lemurjaune.fr, which is composed solely of graphic images of wounded protestors.) Rodrigues, at the time of writing, is beginning a hunger strike, seeking to force Castaner to release an official police report – completed but withheld – into the shooting that blinded him.
Some victims are still too traumatised to come out. Lilian, a 15-year-old mixed-race schoolboy, has not eaten solid food since his jaw was destroyed by an LBD in Strasbourg in December, as he was leaving a sports store where he’d been looking at football shirts that he’d heard might be on sale. It required a six-hour operation to rebuild his jaw, which at the time of writing is still wired together. His difficulty in readapting to a regular existence has been such that he has asked his family if they can move to another part of the country. The identity of the officer who fired the shot that ruined his young life remains, predictably, unknown.
Jean-Marc Michaud, 42, has made the long journey from the Ile D’Oléron, off the Atlantic coast, by La Rochelle. He lost the use of his right eye at a demonstration in Bordeaux (Acte IV) on 8 December. He used to cultivate flowers; now, like many here, he doesn’t think he will be able to work again.
“Could the person who shot you have thought you were causing trouble?” I ask.
“Trouble?” Michaud manages a smile. “I’m an ex-paratrooper. If I’d wanted trouble,” he adds, “I’d have gone with my mates – and lots of them. I was there with my wife. I could see the atmosphere was deteriorating and I told her, ‘Look, we have to get out of here now.’ We couldn’t, so we tried to hide behind a bus shelter.”
“What does it feel like when you’re hit by an LBD?” I ask.
“I can’t help you there. I don’t remember. I was in a coma for two days. What I can say is that it’s not a great feeling to have served as a parachutiste then get blinded by some cop.”
A passing car runs over a Coca-Cola bottle, which bursts. Most of the survivors jump: Michaud a little higher than most.
“Do you ever think about the person who did this to you?”
“I do. I’d like to lay him out. I mean... I would like to see him brought to justice. And then,” Michaud adds, “I would like to lay him out.”
Martin, 51, a Dutch citizen who prefers not to give his full name, was hit by a Flash-Ball in Nîmes on 12 January. “It was a planned massacre,” he says. He touches a faint scar in the shape of a cross on his forehead. “There is no skin or original flesh there,” he says, “for six square inches. It blew off. I was guilty of nothing. You may have noticed that the people who’ve been hurt are not militant or aggressive. We were targeted to discourage the others. What you see here today is proof of a war crime. It’s psychological warfare, to attack peaceful protestors. That,” he adds, “keeps the decent people, who represent the majority of the population, at home.”
In Nîmes, Martin says, “Demonstrations are generally calm. But that day, when we passed police headquarters, we noticed snipers on the roofs. They rained teargas down on our heads. People made a barricade to protect themselves. Nobody threw anything back. When I was hit, the street medics tried to take me away, but when they did they were immediately teargassed again. When I got to the hospital, they had a whole room of empty beds laid out on the floor waiting for ‘injured gilets jaunes’. They were prepared. But how? And why?”
I ask how this has affected his life.
“The Flash-Ball is a terrible and insidious weapon. A real bullet can kill you, but if it doesn’t it leaves a clean wound. I have problems with memory, balance and concentration. I have chronic neuralgia in my face. The pain is appalling. I can’t work. I can’t sleep. Apart from that,” Martin adds, “I can’t complain.”
On the Place de la Bastille march, Philippe, a middle-aged gilet jaune and electrician from the working-class area of Aubervilliers, in the northeast of Paris, who has seen me holding a voice recorder, comes over to ask me who I work for and why I haven’t got any questions for him.
“Have you been wounded?”
“Not yet.” He pauses. “Where are your mates from the British press?” he asks. “Where are the Americans? Pouring tea for Macron? If all this had happened in Caracas or Moscow,” he adds, gesturing towards the group of mutilés, “you wouldn’t be able to move for the English.”
The only person here whose actions could be said to have contributed to his injury, albeit by recklessness, is Antoine Boudinet, a student aged 26, whose right arm was blown off in Bordeaux on 8 December.
“My friends and I threw a few eggs at the police,” he says, “as a symbolic gesture. Then we went to have a drink. We came back to watch what was happening. This grey object landed at my feet. I thought, ‘Well, it’s a regular teargas canister. It hasn’t gone off. I’m about to get this right in the face.’ I noticed it had a red band around it, but I didn’t realise that meant it was a GLI-F4 grenade. I didn’t know what a GLI-F4 grenade was. I picked it up and it exploded. (Film of the incident, which is not easy to watch, is on YouTube.) I could have kicked it,” Antoine says, “but if I’d done that I’d have lost my foot.”
David Dufresne is warmly greeted by the gathering in Bastille, which includes Lola Villabriga and Vanessa Langard. The demonstration around the Catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau the previous day had been tense, as always, but relatively peaceful.
There’s a general sense that, faced with the belated attention given by the mainstream French press to the mutilés, the Ministry Of The Interior and the police have shown signs of tempering their aggression. It’s taken six months, but the procureur de la république (closest equivalent: attorney general) has now announced that certain police officers may face prosecution for their actions.
“If you’d told me even two weeks ago that would happen,” Dufresne tells me, “I would never have believed you. My feeling is that we have possibly staunched the haemorrhage, but the blood is still flowing. This period is historically very significant,” he adds, “because this is the first time in 50 years that the French state has reverted to violent repression, rather than upholding law and order.”
“Does the state’s treatment of the gilets jaunes,” I ask, “have any relevance beyond the internal debate concerning the ethics of French policing?”
“A few days ago,” he replies, “I had a meeting with special rapporteurs from the United Nations. Pretty much every serious global institution, including the UN, has been telling France that they are screwing this up horribly. The French have always had a tendency to believe they are the centre of the earth. And so France has told these bodies, ‘We hear what you’re saying. And we don’t care.’ What the rapporteurs told me is that certain countries in the grip of ruthless dictatorships have begun to say to the UN, ‘You may not like the way we govern, but what we’re doing is no different from what they do in France.’ And that, I think, is very significant and very worrying.”
Will the gilets jaunes be looked back on as a quirk of history or a radical force, capable, as Juan Branco believes, of altering the trajectory of French democracy? Certainly they have done nothing to boost the ratings of a doomed president who, when he sets out to attend a public event, finds that the police have, for his own safety, emptied the streets beforehand, so that Macron, touring in the presidential car, gazes out on what resemble ghost towns. The centre right could hardly be more broken than it already is. At the same time, it’s hard to see the gilets jaunes mutating into a coherent force that could appeal to a populist vote who are weary of the existing power structures: an achievement that Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and friends can deliver in spades.
“Macron,” Philippe of Aubervilliers tells me, “said during the election campaign that we had to choose. He said, ‘It’s me or oblivion.’ Unfortunately, he gave us both.”
“How can the gilets jaunes evolve?” I ask.
“That’s not easy to answer,” he says. “It’s difficult to predict how this movement will develop or even to define what it is. I can tell you,” he adds, “three things that it is not.” A pause. “It is not nothing. It is not worthless. And it is not over.”
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