Paris
Athis-Mons, a suburb by the Seine in southern Paris, is close to Orly Airport, but a world away from the tourists’ City of Light. Last October, at a stoplight in the adjoining commune of Viry-Châtillon, 15 youths with Molotov cocktails attacked police cars from Athis-Mons and nearby Savigny-sur-Orge. Four officers were injured, two of them with third-degree burns. One January night in another neighboring commune, Juvisy-sur-Orge, a mob of more than 50 youths broke into homes with steel bars and machetes, and vandalized more than 20 cars. The police, who took an hour and a half to arrive, made 11 arrests. Seven were minors from Athis-Mons.
This month, the focus shifted to a housing estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a suburb on the other side of Paris, and a case of police brutality that displaced the financial scandals of presidential candidate François Fillon from the front pages. On February 2, four policemen stopped a 22-year-old black youth worker named Théo; they were in the neighborhood responding to reports of drug dealing. The policemen demanded to check Théo’s identity, then tipped the contents of his backpack at his feet. Théo, who has no criminal record, broke free, but not, he says, to run. “I knew there were no cameras by my home,” he told BFMTV five days later. “I managed to struggle away, so I’d be left in front of the cameras. I wasn’t trying to run away. . . . I put myself against a wall, quietly, and then one of the policemen comes and hits me. I saw him with his truncheon. He thrust it into my buttocks.”
Footage shot by witnesses shows Théo on the ground, his body obscured by the officers. He was handcuffed, teargassed, beaten, and arrested. Several hours passed before he saw the duty doctor at the police station. “He told me, this is very serious,” Théo said. “There’s an opening of at least five or six centimeters, and we have to operate as soon as possible.” Transferred to Robert-Ballanger hospital, Théo required surgery for “a longitudinal wound in the anal canal” and injury to “a section of sphincter muscle.” A doctor said he had also suffered severe trauma to his skull.
In 2005, the accidental deaths of two youths who had fled from a police check in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois led to four weeks of rioting in suburbs across France and President Jacques Chirac declaring a state of emergency. Since Théo’s arrest, Aulnay-sous-Bois and its neighboring districts have seen daily marches and nightly riots. Protesters claim that France has “deux poids, deux mesures“—”two weights, two measures”—one for whites, another for immigrants and minorities.
The policemen have been suspended. Three are charged with assault, the fourth with rape. The politicians have taken sides, folding the case into their campaigns for the presidential election just over two months away. On February 7, François Hollande, the outgoing and unpopular Socialist president, visited Théo in the hospital. Hollande appealed for calm and promised “justice.” Socialist candidate Benôit Hamon said that public trust in the police “must urgently be restored” and called for exemplary prosecutions. Marine Le Pen announced that the National Front trusted the police completely and devoted the following day to “security” and showing “support for the forces of order.”
Le Pen did not show her support at Aulnay-sous-Bois, where the forces of order were contending with vandalism and firebombs, but in the southern suburbs, where there had been no rioting. The main security problem this time was the simultaneous visit of two presidential candidates. While Le Pen visited police headquarters at Juvisy-sur-Orge, Savigny-sur-Orge, and Athis-Mons, center-right candidate François Fillon relaunched his campaign with a visit to Athis-Mons’s new Urban Surveillance Center.
The USC, set up in a converted factory in 2016, allows municipal police officers to monitor remote camera feeds from Athis-Mons, Juvisy-sur-Orge, and Viry-Châtillon. On February 8, armed police waited for Fillon in drizzling rain. A crowd of 50 supporters of Left party candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon performed the symphonie des casseroles for the TV cameras, banging spoons and lids on cooking pots while chanting aspersions on Fillon’s honesty. “Is he a criminal?” a gray-haired woman mused with the rhetorical grace of the French. “Yes. In France, all politicians are criminals.”
The protesters charged to the service gate. The police and the news cameras gave chase, interrupting the cigarette break of the USC employee leaning by the building’s back door. “What a mess,” she said, exhaling. “But then, I’m not political.” White, suburban, in her thirties, and disenchanted with the traditional parties, she is the kind of voter that Fillon and Le Pen are chasing. Will she be voting for Fillon?
“You must be kidding.”
Fillon’s car ran the gauntlet, and the candidate was hustled inside. We squeezed into a windowless conference room with a long table. On one side of the table, eight senior officers from the municipal police; on the other, empty chairs for Fillon and the local mayors, all supporters of his party, Les Républicains.
“I think he’s visiting here because the security situation has changed,” said Caroline Barranco, a police brigadier from Viry-Châtillon. She mentioned the disturbances in Aulnay-sous-Bois and the attack on the police cars in her district in October. “They were burned in their cars. That made a vivid impression on the forces of order.”
After the Viry-Châtillon assault, municipal police demonstrated for better working conditions and expanded powers of self-defense. “We need more security, more equipment, and more money,” Barranco declared. That afternoon at the nearby Juvisy-sur-Orge police station, Le Pen promised to “rearm” the municipal police, both materially and “morally”—including the “presumption of legitimate defense” in cases of police violence against citizens. Fillon renewed his campaign on a promise of law and order—to draw voters from the National Front.
Fillon and the mayors filed in, like a white-collar suspect with a team of lawyers. He wore a dark gray suit, a blue-striped shirt, a natty, knotted wool tie in dark blue. For February, his suntan was several shades richer than appropriate to a public servant campaigning as the candidate of austerity and transparency. He listened as the police described their problems: insufficient budgets, rising crime, poor communication with the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie, and managing “the politics of security” between the various police agencies and the layers of local government.
Fillon shifted in his seat. He stroked the parting where no hair is out of place. He scratched the fingers of his left hand at the cuticle of his thumb. He dropped his gaze to the table and frowned as though disappearing into his thoughts. Now and then, he looked warily over the policemen’s shoulders, to the journalists and photographers who stood behind them. More than a week had passed since the weekly Le canard enchainé broke the “Penelopegate” story, the news that Fillon put his wife and two of their children on his parliamentary payroll. His support has collapsed.
In mid-January, Fillon was polling as high as 26 percent, just behind Le Pen, in the first round of voting (to take place April 23), and stood to defeat her in the second round (May 7) by a margin of 65 to 35 percent. This week, Fillon is polling only 17.5 percent in the first round. He has ceded second position, and a place in the second round, to the centrist technocrat Emmanuel Macron.
The parquet national financier, the national financial prosecutor, has yet to decide whether to send Fillon’s case to a magistrate or open a criminal inquiry. Perhaps Fillon was relieved that he was the one asking questions of the police. He interrupted a meandering report from one of the policemen and leaned forward to suggest his incisive grasp of the issues.
“How many dogs do you have?” he asked.
“One.”
Everyone laughed. The policemen returned to their litany of problems, from traffic jams to terrorism. The mayors parried with promises of bureaucracy, and then Fillon took the microphone. He held it low and talked quietly, as though every word might be used in evidence against him.
“This place is a symptom, a symbol of insecurity,” he said. “The municipal police must maintain the public’s trust. The municipal police also need the means of control, and to be able to cooperate with the national police.” Like Le Pen, he promised material assistance and money—”vehicles, modern equipment,” and, despite campaigning to cut government expenditure, “12 billion euros” for police, justice, and defense. Like Macron, he vowed to apply “technological progress” to policing. Perhaps the technological savings will fund some of his 12 billion euro gift.
Le Pen argued for unconditional support and arming the municipal police. Fillon will consider “obligatory armament” and offered conditional moral support in the face of “mounting violence.” There are, he said, “good historical reasons” for periods in which the public has felt “distant” from the police. “But if the violence continues, a large majority of the French people will support the police. . . . For now, we must carry ourselves with absolute intransigence.”
No questions were taken from the press. Fillon hurried out of the room like a fugitive. Later that day, a National Front communications operative tweeted photos of Hollande by Théo’s bed and Le Pen at the police station. “One is on the side of the shields of the nation. The other is on the side of the rabble.” Fillon has chosen his side on immigration, Islam, and law and order. But can it revive a campaign tainted by allegations of corruption?
The next day, intransigent before calls for his resignation, Fillon delivered a second non-apology to the cameras and the party members. “I have nothing to hide,” he insisted. The media were after him because he was “an ideological enemy” of “the system.” “I’m not afraid of transparency, and I expect my competitors for the presidency to be as clear as I am. No doubt the press will require information from them. If not, then there really are two weights, two measures.”
On Friday, a poll showed that Fillon’s obduracy had failed to raise his support. A police source claimed that Théo’s trousers had “slipped down on their own.” Police arrested an Islamist cell in the southern city of Montpellier. Protests and riots spread from Aulnay-sous-Bois to neighboring suburbs. On Thursday, the state prosecutor decided to keep the Penelopegate case open. With Fillon floundering and Macron a callow insider associated with the failed Hollande, a National Front presidency becomes less unlikely.
“Security forces have been targeted by gangs of scum that nothing seems to be able to stop any more,” Le Pen said on Monday, “and certainly not the courts, in an overall context of decadence.” ¨
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, teaches politics at Boston College.
