It is Saturday March 25th and incidents are breaking out during the protests at Sainte-Soline in west France against local plans for agricultural reservoirs. A man is in danger of dying. An observer from France's Human Rights League (LDH) and a doctor, who are watching events at a distance from the demonstration's support base, urgently phone the local fire brigade and then speak to an operator at the ambulance service SAMU.
The situation was critical. The emergency services had been blocked as they tried to intervene, despite warnings over the state of health of this particular demonstrator (who remains in a critical condition). A recording – whose existence was revealed by Le Monde and extracts from which were broadcast by Mediapart – has revealed the contents of the conversation between the observer and the doctor and the emergency services. In the recording the two men emphasise that the situation is a matter of life and death and insist that urgent help is needed.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“We spoke to a doctor on the spot and we explained the situation to him, that we won't send a helicopter or an [ambulance] to the scene because we have an order from the forces of law and order not to send them,” replied the SAMU operator. The latter did not know it at the time, but this simple phrase completely contradicted the account that would be given by interior minister Gérald Darmanin.
Faced with growing controversy over what happened - at the time the recording's existence had not yet been revealed by Le Monde and Mediapart - the minister in fact stated two days later on Monday March 27th: “No, the force of law and order did not stop the emergency services from intervening. It was the gendarmes and the emergency services who were stopped from intervening by certain troublemakers.”
Gérald Darmanin: "Aucune arme de guerre n'a été utilisée par les forces de l'ordre à Sainte-Soline" pic.twitter.com/rG4p01ZIca
— BFMTV (@BFMTV) March 27, 2023
During those same remarks Gérald Darmanin went on to pronounce two other lies which he would be forced to retract later. “No, the gendarmes did not fire flash-ball launchers from quad bikes. Only tear-gas grenades were fired. No, no weapons of war were used by the forces of law and order at Sainte-Soline,” he insisted to the media. A few hours later, in the studio of the 'C à Vous' programme on France 5 television he corrected himself. “There were two flash-ball launchers, that's completely forbidden. They will be suspended,” he said of the gendarmes who had fired them from their quad bikes.
On that same day the gendarmerie's director general, Christian Rodriguez, was himself submitting a report, since made public, which provided an “initial assessment of the public order operations” at Sainte-Soline. In it he wrote that gendarmes had used 5,015 tear-gas grenades, 89 'stingball' grenades and fired 81 flash-balls (including those two from the quad bikes). Yet as Amnesty International has pointed out, the stingball grenades and the flash-ball launchers are classed as war materials under the country's internal security code. These so-called “less-lethal” weapons can cause severe injury and kill.
From the start of the Saint-Soline protests the observers at the League of Human Rights (LDH) had pointed to the “unrestrained and indiscriminate use of force against all persons present with one clear aim: preventing access to the reservoir, whatever the human cost”. In a press conference at 5pm on the day of the clashes Gérald Darmanin stressed his “total, absolute support” for the gendarmes and claimed that the use of force had been “proportionate”.
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Niort have now opened an investigation into the circumstances in which several demonstrators, including a 19-year-old woman, were seriously injured. Two were left in a coma, though one has since regained consciousness.
The interior minister had also said: “And no, the forces of law and order did not use tear gas against injured individuals who were retreating.” But in an interview with Mediapart Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the green party Europe Écologie-Les Verts attacked what was yet another lie from Gerald Darmanin. She had been present at Sainte-Soline and was one of the politicians who tried to protect the injured. According to her, officers did indeed fire tear gas in their direction.
An extravaganza of guesswork and falsehoods
Last Tuesday, as more and more revelations were made, Sebastian Roche, a researcher at the national research centre the CNRS and a specialist in security issues, noted on social media that there was “quite a problem with the lack of truthfulness in communications from the Ministry of the Interior”. But Gérald Darmanin's lies were no incidental occurrence; during the course of an entire week the falsehoods came thick and fast.
It began on the evening of Thursday 23rd March. That day's protests against the government's pension had been disrupted, in Paris in particular, by several hundred individuals dressed in black who had broken windows and damaged street furniture. They also had thrown cobblestones and bottles and hurled at least one burning projectile at police officers. Several rubbish bins and electric scooters were set alight too.
The minister of the interior visited the Paris police prefecture HQ where the chief of police Laurent Nuñez briefed him on events. The microphones of a group of journalists kept recording in what was a deliberately staged scene.
Gérald Darmanin can be heard questioning the police prefect about the profile of the troublemakers at the protest. Laurent Nuñez replies: “Youths. There's been no change in the profile.” This meant there had been no change in their profile in relation to previous demonstrations, where those arrested had no known radical or political connections. The police prefecture had confirmed this to Mediapart just a few days earlier. Standing in uniform next to the minister was Jérôme Foucaud, the director of the Direction de l’Ordre Public et de la Circulation (DOPC), which oversees public order issues in the capital. He agreed with the police chief's analysis.
The minister recorded his comments and then, away from the microphones, shook the hands of the other police officers in the control room. After five minutes Gérald Darmanin retraced his steps and once again faced the cameras to answer questions from awaiting journalists.
He attacked the “troublemakers” who had come to “beat up cops” and who had been arrested. Asked about their profile, he first of all explained that it was too soon to know, before going on to say that they were “quite young, known to be from the ultra-left”. The interior minister then embarked on a confused statement in which he linked or mixed the concepts of far-left and ultra-left. He spoke of the “disorder” that the “far-left” wanted to cause. He later stated: “We have been able to document how the ultra-left is behind this violence...” The minister concluded later with the words that “the violence is being organised by the far-left”.
This linking of a whole section of the Parliamentary Left with insurrection clearly had its political advantages, but it in no way corresponded with the summary that the Paris police chief and the head of the DOPC had just given the minister.
Was he informed that his accusations would not stand up to scrutiny? The next day, speaking to CNews television, Gérald Darmanin abandoned his refrain about the ultra-left and spoke instead of “middle-class” troublemakers who were “children from good families who … paint themselves black and who go and attack Burger King, McDonald's, a jewellery store”.
Inconsequential lies
That was not the end of the matter. In the late afternoon of March 24th Le Monde, followed by the online site Loopsider and Mediapart, published a recording in which members of the motorised BRAV-M police brigade can be heard insulting, threatening and hitting youths who were arrested in the third arrondissement or neighbourhood of Paris on the fringes of a previous demonstration against the pension reforms.
Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez said he was “very shocked” by the revelations and announced that he had referred the case to the police watchdog, the IPGN. When questioned about this during the 'C à Vous' television programme Gérald Darmanin stated that while the police officers highlighted by the recordings had “not been formally identified”, their “section” would not be “involved” in policing the next demonstration on March 28th.
Unfortunately for him, the following day photographs published by the website StreetPass revealed that the group in question, section 21st CI, was indeed present at that demonstration. This forced the police prefecture to respond that “the police officers highlighted in the recording … were not today part of the police presence”. This was either a fresh lie or proof that the police officers under suspicion had indeed been identified.
In that same week, during a visit to the Bessières police station in central Paris, Gérald Darmanin had insisted that any form of participation in an undeclared demonstration constituted an “offence” for which someone could be “arrested”. But on March 29th the Conseil d'État - the state's top administrative court and also the government's advisory body on legislative texts – criticised what it called the “false nature” of the minister's comments, calling his declarations on Twitter “regrettable”. In a ruling handed down on June 14th 2022 the country's top criminal appeal court, the Cour de Cassation, had stated: “Neither article R.644-1 of the Criminal Code nor any other legal provision or regulation makes it a criminal offence simply to take part in an undeclared demonstration.”
In summary: Gérald Darmanin asserted falsehoods about the emergency services not being blocked, over the flash-balls fired by gendarmes from quad bikes, about the use of weapons of war at Sainte-Soline, and told other falsehoods about the nature of the troublemakers at demonstrations and about the involvement of officers from the BRAV-M police unit. Finally, he also unilaterally changed the criminal code. The minister of the interior was perhaps badly informed. Or perhaps he enjoys a flexible relationship with the truth. Part of the answer doubtless lies in the quite recent past.
Four days after the mayhem at the Champions League final in Paris in 2022, the minister of the interior addressed French senators and insisted that the chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France stadium had been down to a flood of “30,000 to 40,000” British supporters who were either without tickets or had fake tickets. According to his account, this crowd swamped the stewards and the police who were working together to filter and channel access to the ground. Gérald Darmanin insisted there had been a “massive, industrial-scale and organised fraud in fake tickets”.
Three weeks later the European football's governing body UEFA delivered a stinging rebuke to his claims. It said there had been only been 2,600 fake tickets and that it did not believe the “figures cited” by France's interior minister, whose comments were not disowned or repudiated by anyone at the prime minister's office or the Élysée.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter