I guess my saying that there is a “common French belief about protest” is nothing more than an inference from my experience with activists and from my experience reading French media coverage, which often depicts manifs as entirely normal, expected, legitimate affairs. My sense is that what varies is not so much the norm that protest is a legitimate form of expression, but rather people’s attitudes toward that norm, such that some (privileged) people feel authorized to actually go out and protest, whereas others (perhaps less privileged, perhaps just more apathetic) would never protest, themselves, but nonetheless recognize a manif as a well-established political genre. But I will think more about it.

I very much agree with your point about privileges, the expectations towards the police that goes with them, and the ensuing shock when these expectations are not met. I think this is an important point.

In fact, my main reason to comment was certainly that I don’t think the “implicit bargain” is here about “the right to deviate within pre-arranged limits ((eg, to go on a pre-approved march)”.
Yes, I agree, in this testimonial, there is a sense of an implicit bargain, or of implicit expectations that the police “normally” ought to respect some norms. But I don’t think Lou Andrea expected the police to allow her to deviate from the right to go on a pre-approved march. I think her expectations were simpler (not being tear-gassed, not being insulted, not seeing the police acting as racist pigs and the like).

This is only tangential, but I would just like to add that anger can certainly stem from experiencing police brutality / authority etc, even though one does not expect anything “normal”, “legal”, or “legitimate” from the police.
I want to say that there is anger on the one hand, and “shock” or surprise on the other. I think one can be angry after being insulted, even though one already knew full well that the insulting person does it very often.
But this does not apply to the first testimonial you translated. There, anger effectively seems to stem from surprise, shock, a feeling of deception or betrayal.

My taking issue with an ” idea of a right to protest ingraind in french national ideology” was not about it being pejorative, but analytically problematic.
I don’t think there is a “common french belief” about it. And I think that the last quote illustrates this. The kid in the story does not share the same beliefs about the police and the state and the “right to protest” as the student of the ENS. Yet he is french. Then, I’d say this idea of a “right to protest” is ingrained in privileged-white (french) ideology.
Or maybe it is only that we do not understand the word “french” the same way. That is very probable I guess 🙂
If one defines “french” as white/privileged/bourgeois, then I think I agree with your point.

I am not sure I am very clear. I shouldn’t try to write in english at this hour.

Thanks very much for your thoughful and sympathetic response.

Thanks for your very interesting comments. In responding, I can’t resist starting by saying something about my day. As I mentioned in the post above, I haven’t been involved in this social movement at all, but today I decided I had to go at least once to see what the manifs in Paris looked like. And, at least for someone who hasn’t seen the earlier ones this month, it was quite large; I started to walk from tip to tail and after 75 or 90 minutes I hadn’t reached the end of it.

But anyway, related to the topic of the post, after I got to the end of the march (at Place St-Augustin), I went to walk back to my bike where I had locked it up, only to find that the CRS had set up an enormous blockade across Blvd Malesherbes, making it impossible to exit. There was, of course, no reason whatsoever for this blockade, since no one in sight was doing anything the least bit illegal or even suspicious. Moreover, according to some kid I asked, all or almost all the other exits from the place were also blocked. And I have to say, the experience of having the cops prevent me from walking down a certain boulevard was totally infuriating. So overwhelmingly pointless.

Needless to say, having that very minor exposure to arbitrary police power definitely puts me more in the frame of mind to sympathize more emphatically, more corporeally, with the story at hand. Howard Zinn’s story doesn’t surprise me in the least; I’ve read similar accounts from may 68 in France, and the last decade was full of protests against the World Bank, IMF, G8, FTAA, etc, that often saw overwhelming levels of police force and probably led to any number of similar moments of radicalization.

Having said this, let me say something more direct about your comment. Sure, “activist” may or may not be the right word for Lou-Andrea (I guess I should just have said “protester”). About “national ideology,” again it may not have been the best use of terminology: by “national ideology” I didn’t mean anything extremely pejorative; I really only meant something like “a common French belief grounded in a set of Republican principles.” Sure, it’s also the law, but people’s consciousness of the law is not the same as the law itself, and I guess by talking about national ideology I wanted to pick out that level of collective consciousness.

Having made those qualifications, let me restate my basic point from (1) in the original post. What I was trying to say is simply that people’s response to police violence is a function of their expectations about the proper role of the state. Simply put, one can only be surprised by police violence inasmuch as one already has some prior ideas about what the police should and should not do, as the agents of legitimate force.

Zinn’s experience is actually a good illustration of this point, I think, if “he realized that the State was not what he was told it is.” What such a comment reveals is precisely that he already had some prior notions about what the state ought and ought not do. When I talked about a “bargain with the state,” certainly, yes, you are right that no individual protester has made such a bargain, but what I meant to say was that there seems to be a sort of implicit, collective social contract with the state (a “bargain”), according to which the state has the right to use legitimate violence, but not beyond a certain point. In other words, to get mad at the cops for overreacting is basically to accept that the cops ought to have the right to use force, just not unjustified, excessive force. As you say yourself, what makes the Bellecourt incident infuriating is precisely that it exceeds the usual norms of police behavior. I guess I’m just trying to insist on a trivial anthropological point: that every sense of a transgression presupposes a norm.

On one hand, yes, you are right that this isn’t entirely France-specific; perhaps similar feelings crop up in other democratic countries where there is some sort of right to protest. At the same time, it seems to me that socially privileged people are probably more likely to be outraged by these police tactics than those who (for largely racial reasons) are less likely to be surprised by them. The first témoignage, on the page you linked, has a story where the narrator, a white woman, talks to a younger boy of maghrébin origin:

“Il nous a raconté, sans haus­ser la voix, comme si c’était là quel­que chose de banal, qu’un CRS, en le blo­quant, lui a dit d’un air mépri­sant qu’il l’avait reconnu, lui, un « cas­seur » de ce matin 9h. Le garçon nous a alors dit : « à 9h, je fai­sais une interro ! ». « Ils m’ont dit que les Blancs pas­saient mais pas les autres ». Je lui ai alors fait répé­ter la chose, ne pou­vant en croire mes oreilles. Oui, oui, le CRS lui a dit ça comme ça. Oui, oui. D’autres jeunes stig­ma­ti­sés depuis leur plus jeune âge par les flics nous ont adressé plus tôt la parole, d’un air rési­gné : « eh pour­quoi vous partez pas vous ? Vous êtes blancs, essayez, ils vous lais­se­ront passer, vous… ». Nous n’avons pas essayé.”

What’s interesting here is that the maghrébin kid is precisely not shocked by this sort of police harassment; it’s the privileged white adult who is shocked… Not that this is generalizable, of course.

Does any of this clear things up?

Thanks for your translation.

I am french, and I think you translated the expressions in brackets very well. Maybe “sonnés” would be best translated as “groggy”, or “dizzy”. One is usually “sonné” when one has received a punch in the face, or any other violent strike on the head without passing out.

I am not sure about your first comment. The right to protest is not ingrained in the “national ideology” as much as it is in the law.

“As if, as long as the state respects its side of the usual bargain, the activists will do the same.”

It might be true for some “activists”. But, for example, the student who gave the account you translated did not bargain about anything with the state, did she ? And I am not sure she is an “activist”.

Maybe I am biased, but I don’t think it requires much imagination to see that being detained without any charges, and further being beaten, tear-gassed, insulted and mocked by the police, for hours, and then seeing that almost only black and brown people get arrested, is something that provokes anger.

“It’s as if what produced anger was a failure of the expected bargaining with the state over the right to deviate within pre-arranged limits (eg, to go on a pre-approved march). ”

I think it is much simpler than that. I don’t think there is anything particularly french in all of this. I can remember of an interview with Howard Zinn in which he explained the emotional and political effect of the first time he got beaten by the police. He was simply walking down the street alongside a demonstration, and he got beaten. If I remember well, he became angry, and he realized that the State was not what he was told it is. He became “a radical”.

Did you note that the event at Place Bellecour is a very particular and violent event, even for “french” (police) standards ? (The cop is right, this is an “innovation”, a kind of large scale, dissuasive torture)

If you would like to learn more about the event at Place Bellecour, and further relate to this emotional world, you can read many more testimonials of this kind about this particular event here:

http://rebellyon.info/Temoignages-sur-la-prison.html

If there is anything particularly “french” in all of this, I think it could be the history of the counter-insurgency doctrine and its role in contemporary police (see e.g : http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/catalogue/index.php?ean13=9782707153968 )

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BTW, I try to follow your blog closely, it is very interesting, and good to have accounts “from afar” (as in Levy-Strauss ‘ “le regard éloigné), and yet very informed views, about all this. Thanks for your work.