The 1st of May is each year a day for workers, especially syndicates, to gather during the Labor Day, and to express their claims. This time on 1st May 2019 was the most federating May Day for many years, about 10 000 people gathered this Wednesday in Grenoble to claim their rights. Gathering yellow jackets, syndicates such as CGT or CFDT, climate marchers, feminists, supporters of the Extinction Rebellion movement and others, the procession has left the Grenoble train station to join the city garden.

At about 2:00 p.m. an illegal march formed in the Grenette square and has been scattered by the police who arrested eight people for “keeping in a crowd despite summons to disperse”. Several wounded are to be deplored, both among the demonstrators and the police who shot many tear gas and used their clubs.

This was just a short overview of a movement that is currently still engaged and started seven months ago, gathering its supporters each Saturday in the streets, each time causing a lot of police brutality. A non exhaustive list and map has been made by the french Liberation daily newspaper of the 144 people severely injured by the police during these events. One of them, Ayhan P. injured by a GLI-F4 grenade, remembers :

« I was convinced that it was tear gas, otherwise I would never touch it. I picked it with my right hand and it exploded. »

In a small video filmed by one of the demonstrators during a Saturday protestation of the yellow jackets in Tours, we can see a blast of fire followed by a dense black smoke.

« I am muted, I don’t understand, I look at my hand, I had black gloves, I couldn’t see the glove. I figure out that, in fact, I just lost my right hand. I could see shreds of flesh, a bone exceeding, and the blood that was flowing out of my forearm. At this time, I understood that my life has changed dramatically. The pain was there, the misunderstanding was there, I was looking at the people while shouting “I lost my hand”. »

Ayhan P. is one of the four people who lost one of their hands during these public demonstrations, and is probably one of those that questioned the most our society methods and our inclination to constantly manage protesters with violence. Despite that, this did not lead the Ministry of the Interior to stop using this kind of hand grenades against the people.

© Adrien Jacquier Bret

But the violence doesn’t seem to be limited to the demonstrators or even people walking in the streets without protesting and suffocating because of close range tear gas, and is also showing another face, more subtle but maybe even more significant : journalism molestation.

When I covered the March of the 1st May in Grenoble, policemen were keeping journalists at bay, far behind the “line”, asking them their press card even if it’s not an obligation to have one to pretend to be a journalist in France, making fun of this new generation of young reporters. “It’s way too easy, just look at those phones, everybody can be a journalist without any experience today !” said a policeman when I was claiming to be a reporter.

But this is just an example among many others, were journalists reported to be directly targeted by the police, stuck in the middle of demonstrators when cops are charging in front of them, being refused to leave the crowd even when they show the sacred press card. “ I don’t give a fuck about your press card ! ” said a policeman to a journalist during the recent events of the Sully bridge obstruction by the Exctinction Rebellion movement partisans in Paris.

A recent Huffington Post tribune has been signed by 300 journalists to protest concerning police brutality against them.

“We see that it’s not mostly because of demonstrators, but largely because of the behaviour of police forces themselves. (…) we are facing a deliberate willingness to prevent us from doing our job, to document, to testify about what’s going on during public demonstrations.”

The signatories are denouncing a real repression against them, an anti-democratic way of law enforcement and even physical brutalities :

“Attempts of destruction or confiscation of our equipment, erasure of our memory cards, clubs beating, deliberate and targeted gassing, direct fire of tear gas, Flash-Ball shooting, sting-ball grenade throws, etc.”

The relationships between the people and the police are now rooted in tensions and hatred, from both sides. A situation that doesn’t seem to really worry our french government which recently ordered 40 000 more sting-ball grenades for the police, and a situation encouraging more and more people to join the cause, even if the number of yellow jackets members seems to be decreasing over the last two months. Now the public debate seems to be mired into a Manichean view from which the people only hear police force arguments denouncing rioters against yellow jackets partisans talking about unjustified violence of a deaf and blind government.

Here is the actual role of the french press, in need of breaking the simplification of the discussion and informing the people about the complexity and shades of what we can now call a crisis.