The events that took place at the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on the evening of May 1st 2019 are now at the centre of a political row. The government and senior health authority staff claimed that the hospital came under “attack” from protestors who had attended the traditional May Day celebrations that had been taking place in central Paris that day. They maintained this stance until the afternoon of Thursday May 2nd when accounts from protestors and hospital staff then made it clear there had been no “attack” - and that the demonstrators had in fact been sheltering from police tear gas and charges.
Then on Friday May 3rd France's interior minister Christophe Castaner, who now faces calls from opposition politicians to resign, was forced to admit that he had been wrong to use the word “attack” and said it would have been better to have used the expression “violent break-in”.
So what did happen inside the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital on Wednesday May 1st? Numerous eyewitness accounts gathered by Mediapart and other media, plus videos, and then a formal statement from the health authorities have completely undermined the claims that there was an attack on the institution. Yet according to the police in Paris 32 people were arrested over allegations of “intrusion and damage to the interior of the hospital”. These 32 were then held in custody and questioned over alleged “participation in a group aiming to cause damage or commit violence”, according to the city's prosecution authorities. But all were later freed without charge.
The reason why there were no charges is now clear: the several dozen protesters who were in the hospital grounds did not enter any building and nor did they damage or steal anything. They had instead been trying to escape the intense clouds of tear gas that were hanging over the demonstrations some metres away, and to get out of the way of charges carried out by police officers.
The protestors then sought to escape police officers, many of them on motorbikes, who had cornered them at the bottom of the hospital buildings. It was at this point, at around 4.30pm, that some demonstrators tried to enter what turned out to be the surgical intensive care unit. But faced with protests from the staff inside the demonstrators quickly gave up and showed no sign of aggression. Some of them were subsequently struck by police officers.
For example, Mediapart spoke to Gaël, a computer specialist aged 30, who was arrested during this episode and then released 23 hours later without charge after a night in a cell at the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité in central Paris. “When I made my statement at 4am the police officers were weary and said they had nothing on me or the other 30 or so people in custody,” he says. “I spent practically a day in custody for nothing. I'm very shocked when I see the way that this was used by political leaders and the media.”
The very strange sequence of events that took place began in the late afternoon of Wednesday May 1st just after the end of the traditional May Day demonstration. The public service radio station France Inter broadcast the account of an intern at Pitié-Salpêtrière, who described the attempt to enter the intensive care unit where he was situated at the time. Very quickly the director general of Paris regional health authority AP-HP, Martin Hirsch, made clear on Twitter his “full support for the teams at Pitié-Salpêtrière, who have confronted a group of demonstrators/hooligans during an attempted violent intrusion”. He announced that the health authority would make a formal complaint.
That night Hirsch told the BFMTV news channel that some “absolutely enlightening” CCTV images existed and that they would be sent to detectives. Then, in an email sent at 11.28pm to all AP-HP staff, the health authority boss attacked “some 'demonstrators' who ... tried to get in by force into the surgical intensive care unit” and he praised the medical teams and their “coolness” which commanded “respect”. He said: “We dare not imagine what could have happened without their remarkable courage.”
The following morning, on France Info, Hirsch continued the theme. “A tragedy could have occurred whose consequences I don't even dare to imagine,” he said, attacking the “very serious” and “unprecedented ... excessive behaviour ” and said in his view the hospital had come “close to a catastrophe”. On the same station the director of Pitié-Salpêtrière, Marie-Anne Ruder, said she was “extremely shocked that a public hospital could be a target for hooligans”.
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The government itself quickly echoed these views. At 9pm on the day of the incident the interior minister Christophe Castaner tweeted that “a hospital has been attacked” and that “its nursing personnel have been attacked”. He even stated that “our forces of law and order intervened to save the intensive care unit”. Later, junior economy and finance minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher attacked the fact that “around 50 demonstrators got into an intensive care unit using violence”. Environment minister François de Rugy added to the condemnation over what he called an “attempted violent break-in at a hospital” which has “nothing to do with the act of demonstrating”.
The following morning it was the turn of health minister Agnès Buzyn to add her voice to the chorus of criticism, when she told Europe 1 radio the break-in had been “unspeakable”. She praised the “hospital personnel who were very brave and who had the right reflex to protect the patients before anything else”. The prime minister Édouard Philippe himself became involved, stating that “wanting to get into a hospital in this way is inexcusable”. Politicians from other parties also waded in, with the European Member of Parliament for the conservative Les Républicains, Philippe Juvin, castigating what he called “hooligans who invade intensive care”.
A few hours later, however, a video appeared which showed all these dramatic declarations for what they really were: spin that was far removed from what had actually happened. Early on Thursday afternoon Nejeh Ben Farhat, a member of hospital staff, published six minutes of video footage on his Facebook page which captured the whole scene from behind the door that the demonstrators wanted to get through. Nejeh Ben Farhat is a declared 'yellow vest' activist who has already appeared as a supporter of that movement on RT, the television station funded by the Russian government. Here is an extract from his video:
In the video, demonstrators can clearly be seen running to escape the approaching police, and then climbing up a little staircase to the platform which leads on to the unit's door which is not closed before the protestors arrive. Nurses cling onto the door so the demonstrators are unable to open it and shout at them not to enter. The demonstrators stop trying to get in and then the medical staff themselves go and talk with them just as a police officer arrives at the scene. At this point an elderly man tries to slip in and is pushed back. That is the end of the video sequence.
On Thursday morning two nurses had already insisted – when faced with a group of journalists determined to get them to say what a bad experience it had been – that they had never felt threatened. One of them, Gwenaëlle Bellocq, said they had “not really felt attacked” and had “not really felt in danger”. Her colleague pointed out that the whole scene had not lasted more than “two or three minutes” and that the team had suffered “no real trauma” and that there had not been any “excessive behaviour”.
The same nurse also denied that anything had been stolen from the hospital, contrary to a rumour started on BFMTV that morning by one of the doctors in the unit. The doctor had claimed: “There were other acts of violence in other units in the hospital. In the same building … all the equipment in the digestive surgery unit's computer unit was stolen.” On Europe 1 health minister Agnès Buzyn had herself said: “I've been told of a certain number of abuses, in particular concerning computer equipment which was apparently stolen.” In fact this was not the case, as the AP-HP health authority's communications department has told Mediapart.
Demonstrators knocked to the ground or hit by police officers
In fact, two separate episodes had taken place at the hospital. On Tuesday night, the night before the May Day demonstrations, and following a breaking and entering at the cardiology institute, the hospital reported “major damage to the walls and to the furniture”. Meanwhile on Wednesday afternoon – May Day itself – a “video projector in the staff room in the digestive surgery unit had been ripped from its base and stolen”. However, the AP-HP says that “at this stage no link can be made between these two observations and the intrusion by the demonstrators”. A nurse at the hospital also told Mediapart: “The video projector was kept in a locked room and it's the third time one's been stolen this year.”
The same nurse added that “it was very surprising listening to the story that was being depicted in relation these events : for me and my colleagues it was very clear from the start that that things hadn't happened like that at all!”.
Events on May Day had started at around 4pm on Boulevard de l’Hôpital, which runs along the side of part of Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. As Mediapart reported, the atmosphere had been very tense between the police and some demonstrators. A cloud of tear gas lay over the demonstration and the police carried out several charges. At that point some demonstrators vigorously shook a hospital gate which was an entry to an annex that serves the teaching hospital's university restaurant, which is not marked as a hospital entrance. The gates opened and several dozen people rushed onto the long tarmac road which links several of the hospital's buildings.
The trade unionist Stéphan Borras, from Toulouse, recounted the story on his Mediapart blog on Thursday morning, and Mediapart's journalist on the scene, François Bonnet, confirmed that this was what took place. Wladimir Garcin-Berson, a journalist on Le Figaro, told an identical story on Twitter.
“It was chaos, it was clearly about everyone sheltering from the gas and avoiding the police charges,” Julien, a demonstrator at the scene, told Mediapart. “No one had it in mind to go and break into the hospital and some of us were not even sure we were inside Pitié.” Another witness, Louis, said that like him “quite a lot of the people there, of all ages, had never demonstrated in these circumstances” and that many had “quite simply panicked and wanted to flee”. A third witness told Mediapart: “We were fleeing the tear gas without really seeing or understanding where we were going. They were chaotic moments and complete confusion reigned.”
Some nurses were at the foot of the buildings and they handed out saline solution to help demonstrators whose eyes were affected by the tear gas. “Several of my colleagues even went to look for people on the ground in the boulevard who were very badly affected by the tear gas,” said the female nurse cited earlier. “They had to take them to the emergency unit, which has an exit very close by.”
Julien, who came through the entrance when the gates were already open, pointed out something which has not been so far been picked up on: “The hospital director Marie-Anne Ruder came to meet us and authorised us to stay inside the confines of her establishment,” he said. “She said that she would leave the gates open until things calmed down on the boulevard. Me and two other yellow vests thanked her. The calm lasted around half an hour.”
The director herself gave a different version of events. She told France Info that she had “tried to discuss with them, to make them realise that it was a hospital and that one couldn't enter it in that way” and she came to the view that “discussion was not possible, with a certain aggressiveness and verbal violence on the part of some of the people who were there”.
The attempt to get inside the hospital building took place just before 4.30pm when a large number of police officers came into the hospital grounds to remove the demonstrators. Some were on foot, others on motorbikes, and several videos show that they behaved aggressively. This one shows two police officers wearing motorbike helmets hitting a person on the ground. Another, shown by journalist David Dufresne, gives an indication of the very tense atmosphere at the time.
“We were being charged by police on foot from the back and we tried to cross the hospital grounds to get out by a parallel street but the motorcyclists then came charging at us,” one witness, Mehdi, told Mediapart. He spoke once more of the “panic” that gripped the demonstrators who were scattered all over the place and were trying to hide. Mehdi followed the protestors and found himself at the foot of the steps that led up to the door into the intensive care unit. Seeing that the way was closed, he resigned himself to having face the police and describes being insulted and struck many times. Mehdi says that one police officer hit him three times with his baton and then handed him over him to his colleagues with the words: “Punish him”. As he was being beaten one officer told him “We're going to kill you”. He says he received numerous bruises to his body and took photos of them.
Gaël, the computer specialist who was held in custody, had been next to his friend Mehdi. He, too, had to face the police but he was not hit. “A police officer on foot dealt with me at the foot of the stairs. He very calmly told me he was going to get me out and take me to the boulevard,” said Gaël. “But a group of police officers on motorbike suddenly arrived, shouting and telling everyone to get down, and pushed some people to the ground. The [officer] who was accompanying me didn't seem to really agree but in the end I was arrested and taken in a bus to the cell. Talking to the police officers before I was interviewed I learnt that I had been accused of 'causing damage as part of a group' but in the end I came out with no further action against me.”
When questioned on the afternoon of Thursday May 2nd in France's upper chamber of Parliament, the Senate, health minister Agnès Buzyn gave the government's new official - and more cautious - line on the incidents at the hospital. She told senators: “The investigation will clarify who is responsible, whether there was deliberate aggression or not. I won't go any further as the investigation is underway.”
There are similarities between this case and the incident in June 2016 when a number of windows were broken at the Necker hospital in Paris during a demonstration against a new employment law. The prime minister at the time, Manuel Valls, said the hospital had been “destroyed” whereas most of the damage had been caused by projectiles thrown by demonstrators at the police, who were lined up just in front of the hospital.
Apart from one man who broke windows with a hammer, and another who kicked some, no deliberate attacks on the hospital were discovered. This, however, did not stop health authority boss Martin Hirsch from stating in his email to staff on May 1st 2019 that the incident at Pitié-Salpêtrière – which in the end turned out to be relatively harmless – was “after the stoning of the Necker hospital … the second time that a deliberate attack has targeted a hospital”. Neither the director of the AP-HP not members of the government, meanwhile, have made any mention of the fact that police officers charged a group of demonstrators into the grounds of a hospital.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter