>> chief of staff, Alexandre Benalla, wearing a^
borrowed police helmet, assaulting a woman
and beating a man on 1 May 2018 outside a
café on the Left Bank. (Benalla was dismissed
but was discovered, seven months later, still to
be in possession of two official diplomatic
passports and has faced no criminal charges.)
“You watch Alexandre Benalla in that
video,” Jérôme Rodrigues told me, “beating
someone’s head in. He’s not even a policeman.
What’s he doing there in uniform? And what’s
he doing today? Strolling around, enjoying
his life. Who is Emmanuel Macron to lecture
me on morality? If you’re a good person, with
leadership skills, your conduct and the
conduct of those close to you should be
exemplary. France has a president who does
what the hell he feels like. This sense of
arrogance and entitlement has seeped into
national institutions, such as the police. There
is no opposition other than us. And the media
are on his side.”
Macron and Castaner have remained stub-
bornly unapologetic on the subject of alleged
police misconduct. On 2 June, Castaner’s
deputy, Laurent Nuñez, was despatched to
defend the government on the RTL television
show Le Grand Jury. “We have no regrets about
the policing of these demonstrations,” he said.
“Just because someone’s hand has been torn off
or a person has been blinded in one eye doesn’t
mean that the police did anything wrong.”
Before I ever met a gilet jaune, I’d developed
an unflattering view of the movement, having
read deeply unsympathetic assessments by
French reporters such as Jean Quatremer.
Brussels correspondent of the liberal-left
newspaper Libération, Quatremer has described
them as “a bunch of dumb rednecks... looters,
thugs, anti-republicans, anti-Semites, racists
and homophobes”.
(“Me, an anti-Semite?” Rodrigues replies,
when I mention this. “Here,” he adds, handing
me a photograph of a prisoner wearing
concentration-camp stripes, “is my great-
grandfather at Mauthausen-Gusen.”)
It seemed odd that, give or take a spot of
looting, having followed the movement on the
ground over a period of months I never
encountered any behaviour to support
Quatremer’s view.
I mention this to French television journalist
Paul Moreira, head of the film production
company Premières Lignes. Moreira, who has
shot significant footage of the gilets jaunes,
had just returned from filming an interview
with Steve Bannon in Rome. In Moreira’s doc-
umentary, which demonstrates the American’s
close links with Marine Le Pen, Bannon is
effusive in his praise of the gilets jaunes, pre-
sumably in the hope that they could help him
destabilise the European Union. The gilets
jaunes are, said Bannon, “the most decent >>08-19FeatureRobertChalmers.indd 168 05/07/2019 13:34
162 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019