PhotographAlfred Photos/Shutterstockvolunteers, mainly off-duty nurses, who tend
to the wounded gilets jaunes. A woman screams.
“They’ve taken his eye out,” somebody
shouts. “His eyeball has gone.”
Some who are unfamiliar with the robust
methods of the Compagnies Républicaines De
Securité (CRS), the French riot police, might
accuse Rodrigues of paranoia when he talks
about being cynically targeted.
“They shot directly at my eye,” says
Rodrigues, who, before he was mutilé (a word
formerly associated with soldiers “mutilated”
on the battlefield, it’s one you hear a lot when
conversation turns to the gilets jaunes) had
been working as a plumber. Even before he
was shot, he had been interviewed regularly
on television and with his then full beard, now
trimmed, was already a unmistakable figure.
“One shot,” he says, “one victim. At first the
authorities denied they had even fired an
LBD. Every discharge has to be logged within
an hour.”
By chance the veteran French war reporter
Florent Marcie, famous for his documentary
work in Iraq and Afghanistan, was close to
Rodrigues when he was hit. “Florent was using
professional recording equipment. He visited
me in hospital. He said, ‘I don’t have images of
the precise moment they fired at you, but I do
have the sound.” The television channel TF1
broadcast his report. Twenty-four hours later,
a police spokesman conceded that they had
fired an LBD, but had “mistaken the time of
the shooting”.
Marcie, who has also worked in Syria,
Bosnia and Chechnya, emerged from those
conflicts unscathed, but while filming in Paris- three weeks before Rodrigues was blinded –
he had himself been struck by a Flash-Ball,
which blew a hole in his face an inch below
his right eye. “Florent,” Rodrigues continues,
“talked to me about working in theatres of war
before he began filming us in Paris. It occurred
to me that I’d never put those words together.
War and Paris: two nouns I had never imag-
ined I’d hear spoken in the same breath. I
looked at him and I thought, what are you
doing here? A war reporter? In Paris? What
have we come to?”
Rodrigues became the 20th gilet jaune to
have been “borgne” (the French, unlike the
English, have a special adjective to describe
being blinded in one eye).
“Twenty-four people,” he tells me, “have
lost an eye. Five have had a limb blown off.
Thousands have been injured: their jaws
broken, all their teeth knocked out. An
unknown number have been shot in the
back. What greater threat is there to a riot
squad than an unarmed man or woman who
is running away? Five people have been
shot in or around the groin. One has had a
testicle amputated.”
The LBD (lanceur de balle de défense) is a
high-precision, Swiss-manufactured weapon
equipped with laser-pointer sights. Though
categorised as “sublethal”, its potential to
maim and kill, especially if pointed (as it
should never be) at the upper body, is such
that it is used in almost no other European
country. The GLI-F4 stun grenades, which
contain 25g of TNT and explode, before deliv-
ering CS gas, at a deafening 165 decibels, are
also used only in France. President Emmanuel
Macron and his minister of the interior,
Christophe Castaner, have ignored repeated
demands for the abandonment of the use of
both weapons, from organisations including
the United Nations, the European Parlia-
ment, the Council Of Europe, Amnesty
International, Greenpeace and Reporters
Sans Frontières. At the time of writing, both
weapons continue to be used by the CRS. The
French government’s sole concession has been
to say that they will stop using stun grenades
when stocks run out.
There are major misconceptions concerning
the gilets jaunes on the north side of The
Channel, I tell Rodrigues. Many in Britain
believe that the movement has stopped entirely.
“Absolutely untrue,” Rodrigues replies. “If
anything, the anger is mounting.” (The day
after we speak, there were 30 serious incidents
of wounding in the southern city of Montpel-
lier alone, one so severe that the victim was
initially reported to have died.) In Paris,
numbers of demonstrators are down since the
government took the decision to close off
the Champs-Elysées to the gilets jaunes every
Saturday, but the outrage at the injuries in-
flicted by the riot police (who may be CRS or
another force, termed gendarmes mobiles;
both wear a uniform that wouldn’t look out of
place in Star Wars) is finally beginning to be
addressed in the mainstream news.
The widely mistrusted CRS (which formed
in late 1944, partly recruited from the ranks
of the detested GMR, the force used by the
Vichy regime to counter the French Resistance)
are complemented by a group of plain-clothes
enforcers, the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC),
who you see mingling with the gilets jaunes.
The BAC, in their conduct and appearance,
resemble nothing so much as the less concilia-
tory type of Millwall supporter.I tell Rodrigues that many observers in (^) >>
M
Most of us who’ve lost an eye were hit near
the cheekbone or temple,” says Jérôme
Rodrigues, “at which point, that section of
your skull shatters. Your cranium is then
reconstructed using screws and titanium
plates. I was fortunate in that I had no skel-
etal injury. The officer responsible aimed
directly at my eyeball, which burst.” He
pauses. “Coffee?”
We’re talking in the kitchen of his studio flat
in a quiet village 25 miles north of Paris.
Rodrigues, 40, the most engaging and articulate
of the prominent gilets jaunes – he doesn’t
appreciate being called a “leader” – hands me a
grey object roughly as large as a roll-on
deodorant: a 40mm calibre projectile from a
weapon known as an LBD 40, popularly
referred to as a Flash-Ball. Its rigid outer casing,
weight (60g) and speed of trajectory (360kph)
makes it absurdly euphemistic to refer to it as
a “rubber bullet”.
Rodrigues was filming on his mobile phone
when he was blinded by an LBD in the Place
de la Bastille on 26 January, during the
eleventh “Acte”, as the gilets jaunes call their
Saturday demonstrations. Acte I took place on
17 November 2018. The first thing you hear
on Rodrigues’ recording is the launching of a
stun grenade – the widely feared GLI-F4,
which is packed with TNT and has blown off
the limbs of several protestors. A second later
comes the sound of the LBD discharging, a
noise similar to the popping of a Champagne
cork. After several weeks of accompanying the
gilets jaunes both sounds are familiar to me.
It’s come to the point these days that when I
hear the word “Paris”, the sensual associations
the French capital is supposed to evoke – the
scent of Guerlain, Gitanes and the sound of
the street accordion – have long since been
supplanted by the astringent taste of teargas,
fumes from burning car tyres and the scream
of police sirens.
“As you can hear,” says Rodrigues, replaying
the footage, “just before I am hit I’m telling
my friends to keep moving, so they’re not
sitting ducks.”
When Rodrigues falls to the ground, his
mobile hits the pavement but continues to
record. People call for the street medics – the
Macron ignored
demands from the
UN to stop using
‘rubber bullets’
and stun grenades
08-19FeatureRobertChalmers.indd 164 05/07/2019 13:33
158 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019