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(en) France, Monde Libertaire - IDEAS AND STRUGGLES: Police and Democracy (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Date
Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:21:47 +0300
"Police everywhere, justice nowhere!" ---- The journal Cahiers
d'histoire, subtitled "Revue d'histoire critique," always offers
reflections on iconoclastic themes. One could even consider this title
an oxymoron. Among the journal's latest publications, we should mention
issue 162, dedicated to the police and democracy from the 19th to the
21st centuries. On the cover, we find an illustration by Josso, a
"peacekeeper" strangling a seemingly helpless youth; a photo of a
Parisian demonstration with the slogan "Stop police violence," which, as
everyone knows, doesn't exist... and a final one in Baton Rouge, USA: a
frail young woman facing three police officers who look more like
Robocop than human beings. The tone is set. ---- As Anne Jollet,
editor-in-chief of Cahiers d'histoire, points out, "the reality
expressed in each mobilization of these young people challenging social
norms is this mixture of fear and hatred of the police." Clearly, these
so-called police forces are failing in their security role; their
presence creates minimal anxiety. The violence wielded by these state
agents is revealed in each social protest movement with the blessing of
the executive. From the Yellow Vests to the demonstration against the
labor law, the death of Remi Fraisse, and the violence in neighborhoods,
Anne Jollet has observed, over a decade, the disconnect between the
police, in the general sense of the term, and the population. This
situation is echoed in the United States, and we can assume that it will
not stop with President Trump revealing his violence every day.
A French expert...
Let's go back in time with the Cahiers d'histoire team, led in this case
by Grégoire Le Quang and Jeanne-Laure Le Quang, coordinators of the
dossier. In the 18th century, the state used the army, and the French
showed imagination in this area. The Parisian police were infamous.
Déborah Cohen analyzes the period 1789-1791, when repression was
organized on the basis of laws, an expression of popular sovereignty.
The objective of the revolutionaries of 1789 was notably to protect
property. Beyond ordinary laws, historians highlight the proliferation
of emergency laws, both in the United States and in the colonies. The
army can be found again in grim moments of our history, such as the
Paris Commune and numerous workers' strikes.
A look at the slogans? For example: "Police everywhere, justice
nowhere!" chanted in the 2000s. How many protesters knew that the
author's name was Victor Hugo, protesting the return of Napoleon III?
"The reuse of slogans is not innocent; it shortens history by favoring
analogies between social periods," asserts Anne Jollet. I highlight the
fascinating exchange between historians such as Arnaud-Dominique Houte
and Danielle Tartakowsky and sociologists such as Sebastian Roché on
"violent practices by law enforcement that undermine respect for the
law, the equality of citizens, and their freedom to freely express their
opposition to the dominant order." For a more detailed study, I refer
you to the book by Sebastian Roché and François Rabaté, La police contre
la rue (The Police Against the Street), Ed. Grasset, 2023; it hasn't
aged a day.
Analyze and Measure
Could this be a failure of our liberal democracies to uphold equality
between individuals and uphold the right to express social discontent?
As I write these lines, the start of the 2025 school year contains the
seeds of strong and legitimate protests due to the state's drastic
budget cuts. Will we see more waves of repression and arrests? Elie
Teicher's article on the violent repression of labor disputes shows that
the state prefers to crush rather than engage in dialogue. This journal
allows us to step back and analyze in order to better measure state
practices. Finally, note an article devoted to Benoît Broutchoux
(1879-1944), an anarcho-syndicalist activist, who was also a victim of
repression.
* Cahiers d'histoire, revue d'histoire critique, no. 162
Police and Democracy, 19th-21st Centuries
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=8578
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