As we drove on, Pujol told me that UberPOP drivers were supposed to stop after they were caught. But he suspected that Misaire, like many others, would probably continue, backed by Uber’s formidable defense machine. “Uber will pay for his ticket,” Pujol said. “They pay for all these tickets. That’s how they operate.” He clenched his jaw and stared into a row of oncoming headlights. “ ‘Stop me if you can’ is Uber’s strategy.”

Seven years ago, on a cold winter night in Paris, two entrepreneurs named Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn’t find a cab, no matter how hard they tried. They were in town for LeWeb, a tech conference, and their experience led to a conversation about how awful the cabs were back home in San Francisco. They hit on a ridiculously simple idea: What if you could get a ride anytime, anywhere, just by tapping a button on your phone?

They began testing their app in New York a year later. That summer, they introduced UberCab in San Francisco. Funding started to pour in — and so did the legal challenges. San Francisco authorities issued a cease-and-desist order, objecting to the use of the word “cab” in the company’s name. But Kalanick, who became CEO, fought back and rolled out Uber across the United States, drawing city and state injunctions just about everywhere it went. Despite all this, Uber now operates in 58 countries and is estimated to be worth $50 billion.

When Uber expanded to Europe, Kalanick decided to unveil the service in France first. But the country made for what an H.R. manager might call a “bad cultural fit.” France is known for shielding workers, strategic industries and a variety of professions from “concurrence déloyale,” or unfair competition. Completely altering the landscape in which businesses operate is not viewed as positively in France as it is in Silicon Valley.

A distaste for marketplace chicanery runs deep with the Boers. The squad was founded in 1938 to police the taxi industry and curb the rise of unlicensed drivers. Their name dates back to when White Russians, anticommunist partisans who fled to France during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, worked as coachmen in Paris. When the police approached, they would shout out their slang word for cop, “bourrrrre!” with a long trilled R, to warn comrades. The moniker stuck.

Until recently, French taxis faced almost no competition. The state strictly regulated the number of medallions available, keeping the fleet small. Though the government issues medallions to drivers at no cost, this scarcity makes them outrageously expensive on the secondary market. In Paris, the going price is about 2o0,000 euros, or $219,000. Today, the city has just 17,702 taxis, only a few thousand more than it had before the Nazis invaded. Yet virtually every time the government tries to expand the fleet, irate taxi drivers protest with a form of strike they call Operation Escargot, in which cabbies inch along thoroughfares, snarling traffic all over the capital.

In 2009, the government authorized a new category of transport, called Véhicules de Tourisme Avec Chauffeur (V.T.C.), to increase supply. These were mostly black-car services that couldn’t be hailed in the street, so they seemed to pose little threat to the taxi monopoly. But when Uber’s black-car service came along in 2011, the market for V.T.C.s exploded. Taxi drivers were never happy about the V.T.C. law, but they grew enraged when Uber arrived. In January 2014, they set up highway blockades and checkpoints, vandalizing Uber cars, smashing windows and slashing tires, frightening passengers in the process.