REVOLT OF THE FLICS

...a police commissioner at the end of his career earns more than an agrege professor at the end of his...

...Additional steps were taken to regain control of the regular police...

...The government wished thereby to demonstrate that while everything is permitted to the police and absolute immunity guaranteed them when it comes to excesses they commit vis-a-vis the public, they are absolutely forbidden to challenge the government's actions...

...On public holidays, the corps that protects the peace of Paris wears the red fourragere, which testifies to its acts of bravery during the Liberation struggle of August 1944...

...This began with the young people...

...If the government does change policies or if the corps wishes to emerge from its social isolation, a showdown is inevitable...

...Not one officer has ever been brought to trial, and if administrative sanctions were taken (clearly inadequate in such cases), none has ever been made public...

...Furthermore, a 1946 law granted the policeman a status that made him a citizen like any other, recognizing his right to organize and strike...

...This was carried further in the prisons...

...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE [f Nicola Chiaromonte We mourn the death of this distinguished writer who, both in the United States and Italy, played an important role in bringing to intellectual life his integrity, his intelligence, his learning, and his unqualified devotion to liberty...

...Yet the very award of this high decoration was intended to make people forget the earlier behavior of the French police...

...Everyone knew—as Edgar Faure, prominent member of the majority, said—that the primary cause of this success was fear...

...After the elections and the formation of the Chaban-Delmas government, Minister of the Interior Raymond Marcellin—though taking a firm stand in prosecuting those involved in public disturbances—had mixed designs...

...when criticized for standing by, they replied that they "had no orders...

...The revolt of the students in 1968, the revolt of the police in 1971, the revolt of the prisons in 1972, and the revolt to come one of these days in the mental institutions—no one has or will have foreseen them, few will understand them, and no one is ready to deal with them...

...For the government as it is today, the fact that the police are demanding reintegration into society at large is nonetheless a threat...

...We can only rejoice that, unlike the Army, the police are giving no sign of having political intentions...

...But despite their being relegated, literally and figuratively, to barracks, the police cannot help but also be members of society...

...Too little politicized to choose the first path, the police embarked on the second...

...In this respect, their situation is growing more and more difficult: their wives are insulted, their children are ragged at school...

...Serving on Moch's staff was a young functionary upon whom this lesson was not to be lost—Raymond Marcellin...

...All these factors coincided, furthermore, with the policy of the government, which never made a move 324 either to put an end to police brutalities or to make even a show of condemning them...

...At this juncture, it was borne in on the government that to use the police in repressive actions of this kind had its difficulties...

...The inhabitants of the Quarter and particularly its small businessmen began to protest...

...No doubt, also, they were given other guarantees: notably, a promise that they would be used with greater discretion...

...If such promises were tendered, they were cautiously formulated, but everything leads one to believe that they were in fact made, the chief clue being a suddenly much more measured attitude on the part of police union officials...

...It is, above all, an indication that the government will no longer be able to use the police to maintain the fear that helped it gain the kind of majority it won in 1968...

...That is what happened with the French Army over Algeria...

...After the Liberation, the police profited from a surge of public sympathy, which arose in response to a last-minute about-face that gave them a chance to reinstate themselves in society...

...The rightward politicization of the police resulted in their sharing in several plots aimCORRESPONDENCE FROM ABROAD 322 ing to overthrow the Fourth Republic and, in 1958, in their marching on the Chamber of Deputies...

...By protecting the police in these ways, the government was pursuing the policy of isolation it had begun in 1948...

...CORRESPONDENCE FROM ABROAD This nascent political awareness was sparked by a grave incident...

...It was clear that most of the time they were serving no purpose but a provocative show of strength...

...or they could elect to rejoin the community...

...Just as the Army, which had brought de Gaulle to power, very quickly became his principle adversary, so the police, after helping to establish the regime and serving as one of its most reliable auxiliaries, became troublesome...

...Yet the atmosphere of insecurity and unrest was not without usefulness: it gave him the chance to make a constant show of his authority, and it also kept the voters in a state of salutary fear...

...The then Minister of the Interior Jules Moch, a Socialist, put them down with great violence...

...Police personnel utilized in this way worked exhausting shifts...

...So far there has been no rebellion in the asylums, but already there is "malaise"—this is the way things always start —among psychiatrists, who are increasingly unwilling to be the accomplices of a policy whose disastrous consequences they are in a position to know well...

...This 1947 purge aimed at cleansing the ranks of Communists or philo-Communists...

...The Occident fascists issued forth and clubbed the counterdemonstrators, throwing their victims to the ground at the feet of the police, who refused to intervene...

...In consideration of the "risks" involved, a junior officer earns more than a teacher...

...But the sense of being a citizen above the law does not go by halves: when policemen know they are never prosecuted even if guilty of real crimes, why would they be willing to see themselves penalized for statements, albeit violent, or for threats that are not translated into actions...

...At political meetings UDR candidates showed films of the Paris riots...

...He wanted to curb unrest in order to ease the electorate and to demonstrate the government's strength...

...The result of this policy was to widen still more the rift, now several years old, between the people and the police...

...No doubt the police were officially promised a "reevaluation" of their pay and "career emoluments...

...And even if public recollection of their actions now is blurred, the collective memory does preserve the picture of the big roundups of Jews—men, women, and children—which the Paris police carried out in 1942...

...On March 4, 1971, a few days before the Occident demonstration, member of the Paris police force knocked off work for several hours and spread out through the streets, distributing leaflets and trying to "make contact" with the public...

...Now some of their union leaders have realized that the police must become once again the servants of the state and not of the party in power (elections are approaching), and the entire force, from top to bottom, finally has realized that its exclusion from the larger community is intolerable...

...The latters' activities were particularly effective in a period when they were receiving the virtually undisguised support of Prefect of Police Baylot and when an officer such as Commissioner Dides, who had collaborated extensively with the Nazis, was able to foment within the force little plots against his own Minister of the Interior Francois Mitterand...

...To compensate for the rights taken from them, the police were given extraordinary privileges...

...Then, in 1948 a new law defining the status of policemen preserved their right to organize but withdrew their right to strike...

...their officers tried unsuccessfully to check it...

...But let us not be misled: this was a pretext only—or perhaps their demands took such violent form only because of the larger social context...

...Essentially, this policy made the police a corps totally isolated from the nation...

...These developments give food for thought...

...Gun fire was exchanged and people were killed...

...Sometimes this protection has come from the highest levels: in a televised talk on June 25, 1971, President Georges Pompidou expressed his "indignation" over attacks directed against the police and tendered them an expression of his esteem— something no president of the Republic before him had ever deemed useful to do...

...And thus, for the first time the police signalled their wish to escape from the social isolation in which the government had determined to contain them in order to have them more completely at its disposition...

...as always happens in such cases—it hit everyone with "leftist" sympathies...

...The title alone of a recently published book is a clue to the problem involved—"Youth Must Be Decolonized...

...In point of fact, these disorders were too timely for anyone to believe them spontaneous, and all witnesses realized they were a gross provocation...

...Burned-out automobiles and the Nanterre disorders were effective campaign arguments...

...In 1945 men who had too openly compromised themselves during the Nazi occupation had been dropped...

...The special consideration granted a fascist movement—not out of sympathy with it but to exasperate leftists in the hope that they would, in turn, indulge in some excess—led police union officials to consider the problem of how their members were being politically exploited...

...One final group that is segregated will be heard from, too, one of these days—the insane...

...This was largely inevitable, since the policy initiated in 1948 was accentuated under de Gaulle...

...First, they were allowed salaries way out of line with those of other public servants...

...And it is what is happening today with the police...

...These are all signs of aspirations toward a more open society...

...When the leaders of the uniformed police, meeting in Evian, threatened to occupy the Hotel Matignon and the Ministry of Finance and even "to march on the Elysee," their alleged pretext was a disagreement over pay...

...This event, one of the most serious the last government of the Fourth Republic had to contend with, was among the factors that convinced President Pflimlin he must cede his place to a stronger man—de Gaulle...

...The enforced segregation exacerbated their anger and, therefore, their brutality: the more detested, the harder they lay about them...

...Modem society practices a kind of segregation with regard to certain groups...

...What's more, it so happened that such incidents were never repeated, whether the police were present or absent...

...The countless barriers and fences that enclose modem society are becoming increasingly unbearable for those people whom such barriers cut off from a community to which they feel—justifiably—they belong...

...Thus proof was impressed not only upon the public but upon the police themselves that they were being used not to maintain order but to serve government policy...

...Because the police were by now organized, many of them belonging to the Confederation Generale du Travail (COT), they balked at such assignments...

...On March 10, 1970, the movement known as Occident, which makes no bones about being fascist, received permission to hold a meeting in the Palais des Sports...

...For someone who, like myself, lives near the Latin Quarter, the spectacle of squads of police helmeted and armed with shields and clubs became a daily experience...

...But it means also that there is no prospect of changing a given policy, and that the privileged group may not be allowed to be part of society as a whole...

...M. Monate, secretary general of the Federation des Syndicats de Police, has since disclosed that the police had reported how members of the Occident movement had brought weapons to their rented headquarters but that no one had demurred...

...One Saturday in June, violence broke out— windows were shattered, shops ransacked— without the police evincing any willingness to intervene...

...But, one after an other, groups set apart from society rebel...

...Finally, the police found themselves being treated more and more as special persons, not subject to common law...

...but now a second cleanup was ordered...

...For society, incarceration is a way of getting rid of delinquents—just as it gets rid of the young by shutting them up in schools or exiling them to campuses—but this method is challenged by those who must endure it (the rebellious prisoners) and by those who are responsible for it (the magistrates...

...Like Joseph Prudhomme's sword, the police are charged with the responsibility to defend public institutions and, when the situation requires it, to imperil them...

...it may wish to make use of them, as in the case of the police today or of the Army yesterday, or it may wish to intimidate them...

...This initiative came from the rank and file...

...But every attempt to break down the walls will finds society wanting, for society generally thinks in political terms, and these are not political matters...

...Another police union official pointed out how very suspect this was, since the Ministry was in the habit of sending substantial numbers of police to "contain" Communist demonstrations whenever they occurred —although, he added, they pass "so peacefully that they remind me of the processions held in my village on August 15 for the Feast of the Holy Virgin...

...Because CRS units were organized along military lines and the men, even if married, had to live in barracks, it was assumed that they would be sheltered from the currents agitating the citizenry...

...For ever since what is delicately termed police "malaise" has surfaced and the men have made it clear they've had enough of being thus employed, the Latin Quarter has been free of police—and calmer than it has been for the last three years...

...There was general agreement that they were never to be charged with the excesses they often, and for the most part unnecessarily, displayed...

...The police know, of course, that they can count on the government to protect them in all circumstances—especially when they are in the wrong...

...Not even the most serious of these excesses ever resulted in court action against them—not in the case of the dozens of Algerians killed in 1959, or of the eight people in the 1960 Charonne demonstration who were murdered as they were taking refuge in a Metro station...

...The more excluded from the community at large, the more they long to take their revenge on that society for the harm done them...

...Purified of all leftist elements, the police—especially in Paris—were stirred up by rightist groups...

...To prevent the police from being "recognized" and becoming victims of a public impulse to settle accounts with them, a vast game of job transfers was instituted in 1968...

...Furthermore, the Minister of the Interior "overused" the police for obvious political reasons—to demonstrate his strength and, if necessary, to provoke unrest in order to put it down...

...As they came to be assigned to increasingly political tasks (the struggle against the FLN in Algeria and OAS at home), the police were granted almost total immunity from prosecution...

...Similiarly, governments and political parties, elected assemblies and appointed bodies, are discovering that they are incapable of coping with situations they not only have failed but are not constituted to anticipate...

...On the day of the meeting, antifascist groups organized a counterdemonstration outside the Palais des Sports...

...The situation in which the government finds itself today is of its own making and somewhat analogous to the situation it faced in 1958 and again in 1961 in relation to the Army...

...PARIS The 1968 French elections, held on the heels of the May riots, gave the Gaullist UDR and the Right generally a parliamentary majority...

...they were billeted in makeshift accommodations, and any family life was impossible...

...For the four years of occupation, they had carried out the orders of the Nazis or their Vichy servants...

...Obviously, the instrument of this policy was the police...

...Accordingly, a special corps was created, specifically to maintain public order— the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, or CRS...

...For years, it condoned the Army's every excess in Algeria, but then was surprised that CORRESPONDENCE FROM ABROAD the Army should claim other rights and immunities, this time on a political level...

...More and more hated by the people, the police found comfort only in the government, which un failingly supported them, provided only they obeyed orders blindly...

...After some months, differences between the police and the government subsided...

...In 1947, after the break with the Communists, the government had to cope with vast, revolutionary-style strikes...

...The police had only two directions in which to move: either they could assert that they were an all-powerful organ and that the exorbitant powers already recognized as theirs gave them all rights, including the right to develop their own policy...

...The "malaise" has arisen because the police have became aware of the political and sociological demands made on them...

...The government responded to the intemperate language of the union leaders with administrative action: five leaders were cashiered or forced to retire...

...But this situation could not continue...

...When dealing with such organizations as the Army or the police, to encourage or to permit practices that run counter to justice and law means that for a limited time one is assured of the services of a group ready for anything...

...for example, CRS units were sent from Brittany to squash leftists at Nanterre, and police from Marseille were dispatched to restore order in Lille...