Letter From France: Rise of the Nationalist Warrior Cop

During this year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations across France, 1,173 cars were torched and 505 people were arrested. This was an increase over last year, but the Ministry of the Interior was upbeat. “All the local prefects reported a less agitated night in the suburbs than last year,” it stated, “and more limited urban violence.” 

There is a spiral of violence running across French public events. Mass gatherings are not new — whether celebrations like New Year’s, soccer matches or the large protests that have been part of French political life since the revolution — but the police response has in recent years grown more violent and repressive, with corresponding increases in deaths and injuries. This, in turn, has led to more extreme protests and confrontations. With the far-right National Rally expected to take over the presidency after Emmanuel Macron, many are now wondering if this is just the warm-up act for a nationalistic and racist police state.

As America agonizes over the Immigration and Customs Enforcement killing of Renee Nicole Good, the French are dealing with the fallout of a 2017 change of French law. Justified as an anti-terrorist change, the so-called Cazeneuve Law removed the requirement that police could only shoot in self-defense in case of refusal to stop a vehicle when ordered. This has so far only led to civilian deaths, including a steady trickle of execution-style shootings of young, Black and Arab drivers. In the rare cases where such a shooting eventually comes to court, officers are either given suspended sentences or the cases are simply dismissed.

This change of policy comes as the paramilitary style of policing established after the Second World War is armed with a new generation of weapons: armored vehicles, body armor, two kinds of tear gas grenades and a new kind of rubber bullet whose French maker claims has the “stopping power of a 9-millimeter handgun.” For the supporters of the left-wing party France Unbowed, especially the youth, these heavily armed police forces are right-wing storm troopers, happy to shoot to kill when they can, and spraying tear gas left, right and center. 

The first big demonstration of this new-look policing came with the Yellow Vests protests in 2018. An investigation by the leading left-wing daily Libération found that police had fired the LBD-40 “flashball” weapon more than 9,000 times during the Yellow Vests demonstrations of November and December, with 144 serious injuries among demonstrators and journalists, 92 being from flashballs. At least 14 victims lost an eye. (One 38-year-old man was protesting in the Champs-Élysées when he received an LBD-40 projectile in the face. The reconstructive surgery didn’t work, and he is permanently disfigured. The officer involved in the incident had fired his weapon 55 times that day, and the court awarded a six-month suspended sentence, which his lawyer immediately appealed.)

The highest profile confrontation since the Yellow Vests came in March 2023, when riot police clashed with 30,000 protestors at a “Megabasin” site in Sainte-Soline in western France, a huge temporary reservoir that was part of a connected network built to store irrigation water for agribusiness, draining wetlands and destroying habitat for many species. As Christopher Ketcham put it in a recent report in The Baffler:

The reservoirs’ broad purpose was to help large agricultural operators meet their already enormous water needs in the production of corn, a singularly thirsty cash crop, as heat waves and drought worsened across the country. Put another way, the reservoir complex was a form of climate adaptation, but one that attempted to monopolize a public good — water, that basic necessity of life on Earth — for the benefit of private interests.

The day before the protest, the minister of interior at that time, Laurent Nuñez, declared on TV that there was a great danger that the protesters were aiming to kill gendarmes. This declaration set up what is now remembered as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Two hundred demonstrators were injured, 40 of them seriously, with two left in a coma for several days. 

Four of the injured protesters engaged the slow-moving complaint procedure (dismissed by the court of Rennes in December 2025 with the public prosecutor citing the “ultraviolent” nature of the protests), but halfway through, a joint investigation by Mediapart and Libération uncovered 85 hours of body camera footage from the gendarmes. Some of it is the same kind of macho-man bluster you would get from ICE or any other riot police: “A grenade in the nuts! That moves them along!” or, “Kill one or two of them. It’ll calm the others down.” Much more serious is the video of senior officers ordering their men to lower their tear gas grenade launchers to line-of-sight use. This is not only illegal and potentially lethal, but was also specifically contradicted by the internal investigation.

It is not surprising that France leads Europe in deaths caused by police operations (including police custody). Since 1991, the United Nations has demanded figures for police-related deaths from member states, and France only began to provide these in 2018. But an independent journalist named Ivan du Roy has created a website, Basta!, which documents cases from primary sources: 861 deaths since 1977. “This is still a taboo subject in France, because as soon as you accuse the police, then you are against the police,” says Roy. His figures show that most deaths are of men under 27, with a big bulge around age 20. The year-by-year death rate has been steadily climbing since 2020.

Given this atmosphere of violence and the illegal methods routinely applied with impunity, it is not surprising that a culture of “see no evil” has grown among the police. But there are signs of growing pushback by the public. Last year, a highly-publicized report called #MeTooPolice investigated something nobody had paid much attention to: sexual harassment and assaults by police against women (and a few men). The largest categories were for assaults against female officers and administrative staff and assaults against spouses; there are also many documented cases of girls and women being assaulted during routine police procedures. In 2017, an officer responsible for the domestic violence office in Toulouse allegedly coerced a woman coming to complain about her husband to fellate him. Her case, with five co-complainants, is still crawling through the courts.

Other cases involve sex workers, handicapped and homeless people and adolescents brought in for questioning. As with police violence generally, there is often a racist dimension, with girls of North African descent often targeted. But nobody knows how big the iceberg is. In Villeurbanne in central France, an officer made a woman strip so he could examine her genitals with a flashlight. The resulting investigation found 57 other women harassed, assaulted or raped while reporting crime at the same precinct.

In 2015, 18 girls age 14-23 complained against a suburban police brigade in Paris with a catalog of complaints. In addition to sexual abuse, they were kicked and punched, beaten with batons and insulted racially and with Islamophobic language. Young Arab men complain of being sodomized with police batons, one one such man has been trying to get his case to court for 10 years. An officer with the CRS, France’s special mobile police force, was found to have been patrolling the A13 freeway alone since 2011, specializing in stopping single girls leaving nightclubs, and offering not to prosecute them for DUI in return for sex. His defense against 10 women bringing a complaint? Consensual sex every time.

The leading academic expert on police violence in France, Sebastian Roché of the National Center for Scientific Research, places the blame for the spiraling violence not with the individual police officers, not with the families of the young Arabs, but squarely with the politicians who decide on more and more lethal weapons, shorter training periods and, by implication, a culture of “might is right” as far as the police are concerned. It is a bellwether for the growing prevalence of authoritarian attitudes. “It is our lawmakers,” he said, “who draw their ideas from the extreme right, propagate concepts like de-civilization and social breakdown, which are then echoed in the police trade unions that talk of ‘war’ against ‘vermin’.”

Roché stresses the impact this is having on the politics of the rising generation. 

“The youth are particularly sensitive, more than any other segment of the population,” he says. “These experiences [of police brutality] engender not only a rejection of the police, but also a loss of confidence in the elected representatives and the law, and a failure in belief in democratic processes. This explains why appeals to calm or the decision to put a policeman on trial for manslaughter have little effect.”