Analysis : French Police Tactics Criticized : Cruel Spirit Seen in Force Used at Student Protests

For six months or so, foreigners could feel a cruel, authoritarian spirit at work in French society. Yet, although foreigners felt it, most French did not. Suddenly, the student protest demonstrations erupted last week and exposed the spirit at work, culminating in the death of a 22-year-old student who had been clubbed and kicked by police.

The shock of this excess, and images on national television of police pushing around students and ordinary citizens, repelled the French so much that Premier Jacques Chirac felt forced this week to withdraw the university reform bill rejected by the students. It was a humiliating political defeat for him.

Now, newspapers and newsmagazines brim with articles dissecting the police and their role in the protests. Many questions remain unanswered. But it is hard to disagree with a police union leader that the troubles may have destroyed “years of work to persuade the community of citizens to accept the police and their role.”

The seeds of the problem, however, were at work much earlier. For the last half-year, the police have been encouraged to treat foreigners with contempt and suspicion. Most French have either ignored this or acquiesced in it. The few complainers have met a blast of tough rhetoric from a government insisting on the need to fight terrorism and illegal immigration. A tough, no-nonsense mood developed that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called “a refusal of generosity.”

Victim of Algerian Descent

Faced with the student protest, the government and police, whether intending to or not, treated the students with the same heavy-handedness and mean-spiritedness that it had been treating foreigners for months. Some bitter immigrant groups, in fact, do not believe it completely accidental that the young student who died was of Algerian descent.

Chirac’s government came to power last March 16 on a platform that catered to rightist demands for more police protection against crime and for more restrictions against illegal immigrants and against the ease with which children of immigrants could obtain citizenship. Many French resented the North African Arab immigrants, and many blamed them for most of the petty crime in the cities.

By autumn, the government’s attempt to deal with the immigrant problem became confused and distorted by an outburst of terrorist bombings in Paris that are believed to have been the work of a clan of northern Lebanese under Syrian government influence trying to win release of their clan leader from a French prison. To show that it was on top of the situation and in pursuit of the killers, the Chirac government imposed a series of measures that, under the guise of tracking down terrorists, did little more than harass immigrants.

Riot policemen, carrying submachine guns, began patrolling the main streets of Paris, stopping pedestrians with dark skin or Arab features to demand identity papers. This reporter has never seen anyone else stopped.

‘Why Don’t You Go Back Home?’

In a joint letter to a news magazine a few weeks ago, the parents of a French mixed-race daughter complained that she had been stopped innumerable times on her way to classes every day in the Pompidou Center. On one occasion, when she had forgotten her national identity card, the police, despite the fact that she had a student card, marched her to the local police station and kept her there for two hours. “If you don’t like it,” they told her, “why don’t you go back home?”

Since the beginning of fall, there has been a daily scene of humiliation at the Prefecture of Police in Paris. As part of the war on terrorism, Chirac imposed a system that requires foreigners, including those resident in France, to obtain visas for leaving and entering the country. Hundreds of foreigners are forced to line up before the gate of the prefecture every morning to wait for their visa. The line is made longer and more slow-moving by the fact that, to prevent a recurrence of a bombing at the prefecture, each person must be checked for weapons.

There is no physical brutality, but the scene is made to order for bullying humiliation. Foreigners push and shove like confused cattle, and police bark orders at them, punishing those who push too hard with the loss of their turn in line. After spending two hours on this line, a foreigner feels his or her status keenly--a foreigner in France.

On top of this, there have been several incidents of police killings of civilians in Paris during the last nine months. On the night that the student was killed, in fact, a drunken policeman shot and killed another French citizen of Algerian descent in a bar in another area of Paris. Out of fear of exacerbating the situation, police withheld news of this killing for two days.

Unleashing of Police Force

The victims in such killings have not all been immigrants or children of immigrants. But critics insist that the killings come out of the government’s unleashing of police force in the name of the war on crime, illegal immigration and terrorism.

In the most embarrassing anti-immigrant act of the Chirac government, police rounded up 101 Malians in mid-October on charges of illegal immigration and flew them back to Mali, in West Africa, late at night on a chartered aircraft. Some had to be shackled to their seats, and none was given a chance to seek legal counsel. This obvious offense to fair play troubled many French, and even members of the government finally acknowledged they had acted too theatrically. In the future, they said, illegal immigrants like these Malians would be expelled one by one.

Many members of the government, especially Minister of Interior Charles Pasqua, tended to treat the recent student protests with the same authoritarian manner used to treat immigrants in the last few months. Some rightists insisted, in fact, that immigrant groups were the real force behind the student protests. For days, the government seemed to blind itself to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the students were children of middle-class families who may even have voted for Chirac’s conservative coalition.

The main police problem during the student protests was the failure of the police to distinguish between, at most, a few hundred hooligan troublemakers and, at least, tens of thousands of peaceful student demonstrators. The police were not helped by some of the overblown rhetoric from the government and its supporters.

‘Afflicted by Mental AIDS’

Louis Pauwels, an editor of Le Figaro, a newspaper close to the government, said that the students, impregnated by years of Socialist cultural doctrines, were “a youth afflicted by mental AIDS.” Pasqua, in a fiery speech denouncing the violence, urged members of Chirac’s Gaullist party “to be ready, if events prove it necessary, to call on Frenchmen to join us in defending democracy and the republic.”

The excess in those words troubled many French. Bernard Deleplace, the leader of the strongest police labor union, said sarcastically, “Perhaps he thinks that the police and gendarmes are not capable of doing their work.”

The mounting public resentment against the treatment of the students, the shock over the death, the insistence of President Francois Mitterrand, and the calls from Cabinet members finally persuaded Chirac to give in to the students and withdraw the university reform bill.

But Chirac went one step further. He postponded consideration, until at least next April, of a controversial nationality bill. That bill, deeply resented by young immigrants, would no longer grant automatic citizenship to children born in France of immigrant parents. Instead, the children would have to formally apply to the courts for such citizenship and, in certain circumstances, could fail to win it.

Even before the student protests, Chirac knew that consideration of the bill would probably provoke immigrants into street demonstrations. But he and Pasqua probably thought such demonstrations could be handled relatively easily by the police. But there are two complications now: there is a new and powerful student movement to march alongside the immigrants, and there is a growing French public troubled by the heavy-handedness of its police.