The anti-police of Mai ’68 fifty years on

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Notes

1. Campaigners against police violence have estimated that 10–15 deaths are caused by the French police each year but until 2016 no centralised official records were kept. Instead, campaign groups such as the ‘Vies Volées’ collective [http://atouteslesvictimes.samizdat.net/?page_id=725] maintained their own online lists (Jobard and de Maillard 2015, 157).

2. This was manifestly a political decision, albeit not one articulated in such terms at the time. The French police tend to be reluctant to investigate and sanction the use of excessive force by officers in the course of their duties. Sociologist Cédric Moreau de Bellaing (2016), who analysed reports from the Paris police inspectorate from 1996 to 2013 and conducted fieldwork in the Paris police training school at around the same time showed that while excessive force by officers on duty was very seldom sanctioned, the use of violence by officers who were off-duty frequently resulted in disciplinary action.

3. The CRS were formed in 1944 from an amalgam of the purged remnants of Vichy’s Groupes Mobiles de Réserve, a force dissolved by de Gaulle in December of that year, and the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur.