"I am the fruit of a form of historical brutality."
Macron, February 13, 2018, in front of the presidential press.
Certainly, the State defines this Moloch who has a monopoly on legal violence: but for what purpose? Except for radical irenicism, human nature being what it is, there is no question of imagining a world in which we no longer need an army or police, courts or prisons, law and law. If we consider that a rapist is not a raped, an aggressor an assaulted, a thief a robbed, a looter a looted, a batter a hit, a series of social mechanisms must be in place to apprehend the rapist, the aggressor, the robber, the batter in order to refer him to the courts, which judge facts in accordance with the law and the law, and send the person found guilty to serve his sentence in the name of repairing the raped, assaulted, stolen, looted, hit, but also in order to protect other citizens from the dangerousness of these offenders. Whether there are aggravating or mitigating circumstances, whether everyone, whatever they are accused of, has the right to a defence and then to compensation once the sentence has been served, all this is a given.
Legal violence implies that it can be used to maintain legality - it should be a truism... However, when, in mid-September 2018, yellow vests indicate, at the beginning of their anger, that their purchasing power will not allow them to pay the additional taxes that the government imposes by increasing the price of fuel at the pump, they do not endanger democracy and the Republic since they call for articles 13 and 14 of the Declaration of Human Rights and, let us not forget, of the citizen. Through their movement, they claim one of the rights that this major text grants them. I have already mentioned this, but let us remember that Article 13 of the Declaration of Human Rights states this: "For the maintenance of the police force, and for the expenses of the administration, a joint contribution is essential; it must be equally distributed among all citizens, because of their faculties." And the next article, this: "Citizens have the right to determine by themselves or their representatives the necessity of the public contribution, to freely consent to it, to monitor its use and to determine its amount, basis, recovery and duration." Yellow vests have not refused taxes, as media propaganda has been saying for weeks to equate them with fascinating populisms, but they just let it be known that they can no longer afford to pay them! From a government perspective, an appropriate response would have nip anger in the bud. Instead, the response was immediately bellicose: this is the origin of the violence.
This bellicosity took the form we know: elements of Macronian power language were provided and then abundantly relayed by the "elites": the yellow vest movement was an extreme right-wing jack-knife movement, a populist claim that smelled like his brown shirt, a movement that smelled like a "facho". BHL made this known immediately at the same time as... Mélenchon and Clémentine Autain, Coquerel and the CGT, who thus joined in their populicide concert all the editorialists of the Maastricht press.
Macron was not very clever, because Pompidou ended May 68 with a cynicism that could have inspired him: two unknown people at the time, Henri Krasucki of the CGT, and therefore of the PCF, and Jacques Chirac, then Secretary of State for Employment to the Minister of Social Affairs, met in the office of a communist lawyer. Chirac would say that it was a maid's room and claim that he had gone there armed... There would be several meetings before the Secretary General of the CGT, Georges Séguy, and the other unions officially met Chirac and... Balladur, then Chirac's advisor, to prepare what would become the Grenelle Agreements. Negotiations have paid off: spectacular wage increases, unprecedented increases in the minimum wage, reductions in weekly working hours, expansion of the right to organise, a boost to family allowances, an increase in benefits for the elderly, payment of strike days, lower social security contributions. The CGT returns to its base with these proposals: the workers refuse; the agreements signed unilaterally by the government are still being implemented - already the collusion of government and union powers, the famous intermediate bodies. Work resumed a few days later. Power plays on inflation: two or three years later, the benefits granted disappear with the increase in the cost of living. Exit May 68! A lesson in political cynicism, but also a lesson in the cynicism of what are therefore called intermediate bodies: neo-Gaullist and neocommunist power were less divided on their political options than they were on the cheese that is always representation, which allows the people to believe that we work for them when we often work at their expense for their sole shop.
Back to yellow vests: Macron had his Prime Minister announce a moratorium on gas prices in early December. But a moratorium is the formula that makes it possible to go backwards and jump better - in this case: to jump over the European elections for which, as everyone has now understood, the President of the Republic is campaigning. This is why he uses the yellow vest crisis for his own account and that of the Maastricht camp. There are no other reasons for its Great National Debate, since it has taken great care to give it the rule of the game from the outset: we talk - well, it talks - but there is no question of changing course. Why are you talking? What's the point? For what purpose?
After the announcement of a moratorium to indicate that a delay was granted before the guillotine, the first symbolic violence, was activated, the President of the Republic likened the yellow vests to "a hateful crowd" made up of anti-Semites, homophobes and racists during the 2019 vows, this was the second symbolic violence. It was followed by a third with this announcement of THE solution with a Great National Debate coupled with the refusal of a change of course. Further violence has since been regularly inflicted. So with this series of slaps distributed at the discretion of his public appearances: a fourth to the galette des rois when the prince announces that not all French people have a taste for effort by suggesting that this is the case with yellow vests (11 January 2019); a fifth at a meeting presented as a debate, when he affirms that, among some who touch the social minima, "there are some who screw up" (15 January 2019), not ignoring that this sociological category is over-represented among yellow vests; a sixth by making it known in a somewhat contemptuous way, still at one of these Maastricht campaign meetings, that "the real reform goes with coercion, children! It's not an open bar. The bar is ours." (24 January 2019 in Bourg-de-Péage) -the real reform is therefore his own, not that of the yellow vests; the "children" who are looked at in a contemptuous way are the same yellow vests; and the mention of the bar is still addressed to the GJs, the image is still addressed to them, one could not better say that, for the Head of State, the yellow vests are false reformers who think like children assimilated to pillars of a bar...
These symbolic violences are copiously multiplied by the Maastricht media power. We have seen it. It is a question of assimilating yellow vests to violent people and everything that can illustrate this thesis is skilfully put into images and words by the media, which are content to relay the elements of language from the Elysée's communication unit, from Matignon's or even from the Ministry of the Interior. Macron is an angry child king and intolerant of frustration, Edouard Philippe a cold-blooded animal well tied, clean on him and polite, Castaner a cheeky man who has kept some of the habits of his former acquaintance in Marseille, but it is the same speech: yellow vests are violent, they attack the Republic, even with a pallet truck smaller than a car without a license, they endanger democracy, they announce a neo-fascist revolution... BHL lends its shirt to these speeches. Editorial writers think like this shirt. Other "intellectuals" offer part of their anatomy to this same shirt.
This symbolic violence, whose armed arm is made up of the system's media, is coupled with police violence. We know that words kill, but to do so, they need violent actors: the government has them with a certain number of justice and police people who, knowing that they benefit from a cover from the Ministry of the Interior, therefore from Matignon, therefore from the Elysée, therefore from Emmanuel Macron, give it their all.
I found myself on a television set with Jean-Marc Michaud, who lost an eye due to a flash-ball shot. He said all his anger against the shooter - and I understand that. It is the first movement, when you have been abused, to want to retaliate in the same way. You get a blow, you don't want anything else but to give it back a hundredfold. The reptilian brain makes the law until the cortex does its job.
Certainly, there is a responsibility on the part of the shooter: but if this shooter knows that he will have to answer to justice if his hierarchy accuses him of misbehaving by not respecting procedures - including the major one of never aiming at the head... -, then he will probably behave differently.
But, when we know that we can benefit from the impunity of the government, then we shoot or beat without any state of mind and, having seen it for myself in Caen, with some spectators of these operations, a jubilation not pretending to hit, hit, beat, throw violently on the ground, handcuff, but also, in some cases on which I am focusing these days: stripping and palpating...
I have already said elsewhere that I assumed that some police officers were drowning the breakers to support the power thesis that all yellow vests are violent. After I gave this information, none of the yellow vests informed me by mail that they had the evidence. I will come back to this subject when the time comes.
But without focusing on this particular case, it is enough to read, in the pen of the mayor various right, so not a leftist, Xavier Lemoine, an interesting information. He states in Le Figaro that as mayor of Montfermeil, he found that "the police repressed riots in the suburbs in 2005 less than the Yellow Vests" (29 January 2019). That's all said and done.
The mayor notes that in 2005 there were no deaths and few injuries among the rioters, although they chose violence as their only means of expression. He gives the reason for this: the police then chose a policing operation and not, like Macron, a logic of repression. However, maintaining order is not repression. These are two extremely different political choices ideologically, politically, strategically, strategically, tactically - and also morally. Emmanuel Macron knowingly chose to repress and not to maintain order. The head of state did not therefore want to contain the violence against workers but to unleash state violence. It's by design.
Xavier Lemoine notes that the choice of policing aims, as the words indicate, to seek above all to maintain order, and therefore to avoid disorder. I come back to this point: I will not be led to believe that letting the Avenue des Champs-Elysées run below the lenses of BFMTV cameras for almost an hour does not testify to the fact that the police were not instructed to prevent disorder, it was easy to do without violence, but on the contrary, to promote it by letting these paving stones become projectiles waiting for their human or material targets...
Speaking of his city, Xavier Lemoine said: "In 2005, all the demands were expressed through violence. However, at the time, the police adopted the most appropriate method of intervention to bring this violence to an end. From a technical point of view, their attack was flexible and remarkable. While they were targeted by the rioters, police and gendarmes showed great restraint in the use of force. Today, on the contrary, no one can claim that all the claims of the "yellow vests" are expressed through violence. In addition, in 2005, there were no women among the rioters, while women are massively present in the ranks of the "yellow vests". To ignore it is to deprive oneself of a fundamental element of analysis. Contrary to what the power of the images may suggest, the majority of "yellow vests" do not participate in the reprehensible violence committed during this movement. However, since Saturday, December 8, the police have been focusing on repression, not policing." To the journalist who asked him to clarify what distinguishes policing from repression, Xavier Lemoine replied: "Policing consists, on the one hand, in allowing a demonstration to run as peacefully as possible and, on the other hand, in containing violence in order to reduce it. This objective does not prevent the police from intervening against people determined to commit acts of violence" - I am thinking of those who take over the Avenue des Champs Elysées... He continues: "But it is still left to peaceful demonstrators to get out. This allows interested parties to leave the premises when things get out of hand. Repression, on the other hand, consists in fighting groups without necessarily distinguishing between violent individuals and peaceful demonstrators, who may be far from them. However, in the current crisis, the police too often resort to "traps", which prevent the people surrounded from leaving the area. It is then easy to confuse very different demonstrators. Among the ebony, how many had broken windows, turned cars over, robbed shops? Similarly, the concern to differentiate between "confirmed" breakers and first-time offenders should be much clearer." For Xavier Lemoine, the police obey a power that has chosen repression and brutality. They obey. The person in charge, therefore the culprit, is the one who gives the order. And, as we cannot imagine that Castaner or Philippe would take the decision alone, it is the Head of State who must be held responsible for the choice of repression, and therefore each wound inflicted. When this same head of state blatantly claims in Egypt that the police have not caused any deaths, whereas we owe them Mrs Redoine's in Marseille, he is lying. And he is personally responsible for this death[1]. He's the bully.
Let us read Xavier Lemoine again: "I do not incriminate the police, who obey, as is natural, the instructions of the Minister of the Interior. But I blame these instructions, which I believe reflect a desire to go to extremes, to increase violence to justify repression. I have no complacency about the premeditated violence of extremist breakers or small groups. But the responsibility of the politician is also to know how to defuse a cry of distress, instead of feeding it by demonizing the "yellow vests". Never before in 2005 did the rulers say such contemptuous things about the rioters of the time. Currently, a significant part of the violence comes from demonstrators without criminal records, desperate and blank-heated. They feel provoked by the rigidity of the police response. With the dynamics of the crowd helping, they are becoming more radical. Their vital reflex is expressed in a brutal way. In 2005, no demonstrations were declared in the prefecture and all of them turned into riots. However, at the time, in Seine-Saint-Denis, there was no charge of CRS or mounted police officers. Today, it is. Fourteen years ago, law enforcement did not use tense, horizontal, man-on-man and short-range fire. Today, it is. Why these two weights, two measures of the state between the urban riots of 2005 and the scenes of riots of the "yellow vests"? I don't think the police were lax in 2005; I say they are too "hard" today."
It is therefore a fact that President Macron has chosen the hard line of repression against the republican line of policing. It therefore has at its service the Maastricht press, in other words the dominant media, including those of the public audiovisual service, it has put at its service the police, the army, and therefore the police forces, and it has also tried to add the judicial system. This is reflected in an article in Le Canard enchainné (30 January 2019) entitled "Les incroyables consignes du parquet sur les villette jaunes", which details how the Ministry of Justice communicated by e-mail with the magistrates of the Paris Public Prosecutor's Office on how to handle vest jaunes: after an arrest, even if it was made by mistake, it is still necessary to maintain registration in the criminal record processing (RJP) file, including "when the facts are not established". The letter also states that it is necessary to file, even if "the facts are tenuous" and even in the proven case of "a procedural irregularity"! In such cases, such as arrest by mistake, unmotivated offence, procedural irregularity, it is advisable to keep police officers in custody and to lift them only after Saturday demonstrations in order to prevent citizens who have been wrongfully arrested from exercising their right to strike, it should be recalled, a right guaranteed by the Constitution? Preambular paragraph 7....
In addition, Macron's so-called "anti-breaker" bill proposes to introduce a presumption of guilt against anyone suspected of being sympathetic to the cause of the yellow vest. Suspected by who? By the same justice to which the authorities ask, first, to keep in custody a person arrested in error, second, to release him only after the end of the demonstrations, third, to do the same, including in the case of a procedural error, fourth, not to worry about the fact that the facts are proven, the sufficient tenuousness provided that the Macronian justice supported by the Macronian police itself at the level of the Macronian ideology, which is purely and simply that of the Maastricht State, have decided that this is so. Mélenchon was able to talk about the return of the letter of seal, he is not wrong on this subject.
Genealogical violence, the one that is at the root of the first claims of yellow vests, is first and foremost that imposed by the liberal political system imperiously installed by the Maastricht State since 1992. When Macron says that the roots of the evil are old, he knows it all too well, because he is one of the men whose short life was entirely devoted to the establishment of this liberal program, which has been strong with the weak, as we have seen in the streets for the past twelve weeks, and weak with the strong, as we see with the legislation that is favourable to them - from the abolition of the wealth tax rate to the refusal to attack tax havens and the tolerance that the GAFAs escape tax.
The violence of this Maastricht state on the weakest, most unarmed, least qualified, most distant from Paris or the French megalopolises; the violence of this Maastricht state on the most precarious in everything, on the modest people who carry alone the weight of a happy globalization for others who conchy them all the time through media appearances; the violence of this Maastricht state on the forgotten of the new compassions of political correctness; the violence of this Maastricht state on single women, single mothers, widows with amputated retirement pensions, women forced to rent their uterus to deposit mercenary sperm, victims of domestic violence arising from poverty, young boys or girls who prostitute themselves to pay for their studies; the violence of this Maastricht state on rural private individuals day after day of the public service that their indirect taxes finance; the violence of this Maastricht state on the peasants who hang themselves every day because the ecological profession of faith of the urban Maastricht masters is not encumbered by ecology when it comes to the French people's plates, which they fill with rotten meat, toxic products, carcinogenic chemistry, food from the end of the planet without concern for carbon footprint and which can even be organic; the violence of this Maastricht state on generations of children made fools of by a school that has ceased to be republican and that leaves only daughters and sons the opportunity to get by not thanks to their talents, but with the help of the piston of their well-born families; the violence of this Maastricht state, which has proletarianized young people whose only hope is that the job security of the police officer, gendarme, soldier or prison guard will be their only hope, and whose job is to manage the waste of the liberal system through legal violence; the violence of this Maastricht state on small bosses, shopkeepers, artisans who ignore holidays, leisure, weekends, outings - these violences, yes, are the first violence. These are the ones that did not generate violence, but just a first demonstration against the increase in fuel consumption.
The response of the government, and therefore of Macron, to this admission of poverty of the poor was immediately the ideological criminalization. The media at the orders cried out for the fascist wolf. For several months, this has been their daily bread: according to the rich who govern them, the poor are therefore anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, violent, conspiratorial - "bastards", says BHL himself at Ruquier. It's the old variation on the theme: working classes, dangerous classes. It is the antiphon of all bourgeois powers when they are afraid.
The power of the Maastricht state operates well enough that, to this day, its responsibility is never called into question! Yet he is the problem! This is so much the problem that Macron wants to solve it by explaining that the problem of liberal Europe is that there is not enough of it, whereas the yellow vests tell him that there are too many - not Europe, but liberalism.
From then on, the Head of State mobilizes the media who misinform, the police who hunt down the demonstrator, the judiciary who severely arrest them, the prison who park them when the hospital does not treat them after beatings. When will it be understood that we have here the pieces of a despotic puzzle?
Michel Onfray
