>> and honourable people in the world”. His
preoccupation with immigration, I suggest
to Moreira, does not appear to be one the
movement shares. I never heard the issue
mentioned once.
“In Paris,” Moreira tells me, “the far right
was swiftly expelled from the ranks. From the
start certain people were calling the yellow
vests fascists. You get no hint of that if you
actually go out on the street and start talking
to them. Pretty much every time a journalist
really engages with them, they develop a
feeling of empathy.”
That said, not every encounter between
the gilets jaunes and press reporters has
been so congenial. In Toulouse, in November
2018, Jean-Wilfrid Forquès was working
for BFM TV. The channel is strongly supportive
of Macron and Forquès had, accordingly,
joined the march protected by bodyguards.
He was obliged to take cover in a store.
“Twenty people chased me. They were
frothing at the mouth,” Forquès recalls, “and
shouting, ‘Look: it’s another tosser from
Macron’s channel.’”In France, the most assiduous chroni-
cler of the fortunes of the gilets jaunes
has been David Dufresne. Addressing
the views of Jean Quatremer, Dufresne
tells me, “This attitude that the great
unwashed are somehow not worthy of
people like us: are they insane? I worked for
Libération. That made me furious.”
Dufresne has become the gold standard on
the movement in general and on police vio-
lence in particular. It’s a peculiar development
in that at the end of last year this writer
(whose books include an insightful social
history based on the Belgian singer Jacques
Brel and a definitive history of French polic-
ing) found himself putting his literary career
on hold, overtaken by outrage.
“It happened late in 2018,” says Dufresne.
“I’d been looking at these images of wounded
gilets jaunes on the internet and... I was just
staggered. They were so shocking – unspeak-
ably gruesome – and yet absolutely ignored
by the media.”
“It’s funny,” I say, “because, as soon as you
hear someone say, ‘You won’t see this in the
mainstream media,’ you tend to dismiss them
as a crank.”
“You do, but on occasions I’m afraid it’s just
true. So on 3 December I sent out the first
tweet addressed to @Place_Beauvau [the
official Twitter account of the Ministry Of
The Interior].” (Place Beauvau is the address
of Christophe Castaner’s headquarters, across
the road from the Elysée Palace.)
Dufresne scrutinised, documented and veri-
fied each instance of police violence. Each
“notification” was assigned a number and,where possible, accompanied by film or
photographs, then tweeted to the Ministry.
At time of writing, his notifications are
approaching 900. Many of the pictures and
video clips are, as Dufresne says, horrific. His
refusal to embellish his messages with
comment or opinion only magnifies their
impact; “allo @Place_Beauvau”, the phrase
with which he starts each tweet, has become
a national institution.
“My statistics,” Dufresne tells me, “have
never been disputed. You know the figures:
24 eyes lost, five limbs blown off. Before
the gilets jaunes, there had been 31 such
instances since 1998. So Macron’s France, in
six months, has mutilated almost as many
people as in the last 20 years. Say that publicly
and, trust me, you find yourself immediately
attacked. You are ‘against the police’. You
are ‘an enemy of the republic’. Untrue in
my case. I want the police to represent the
ideals of the republic. A duty in which it is
failing conspicuously.”
To meet the wounded mentioned in
Dufresne’s numbered Twitter announcementsis an experience not easily forgotten. People
such as Lola Villabriga (notification #159),
now 19, who was shot in the face by a Flash-
Ball in Biarritz at an anti-G7 demonstration on
18 December, resulting in a triple fracture of
the jaw, which has required surgeons to recon-
struct her face. “I was standing on a bench,
filming the people,” the shy and softly spoken
student explains, “when I was hit. I didn’t
think that sort of thing could happen, not to
me, not in Biarritz.”
Vanessa Langard (#154), aged 34, tells me
how she was employed as a carer for her
grandmother before she attended a gilet jaune
demonstration with three friends on the
Champs-Elysées on 15 December 2018. Like
most seriously wounded LBD victims she is
now unable to work. “We saw the CRS,”
Langard says, “and we thought we’d better
keep away from them. So we walked away
for about two minutes. Then I was hit in
the face by a Flash-Ball.” She suffered a
brain haemorrhage and, after multiple opera-
tions, still suffers from lapses of memory and
poor co-ordination. She is blind in her left eye.
“My friend thought I was dead,” she says.
“She’s traumatised for life.” When Langardfirst looked in a mirror, she says, she “burst
into tears. I thought, ‘How are you going to
live?’ It was horrendous. My dad was a
fireman. My grandfather was a police officer.
I didn’t attack anyone. I didn’t insult anyone. I
just walked.” As she puts it, what she experi-
enced, “goes against everything I was ever
brought up to believe, that you should
help people”.
Langard, who lives on the southern
outskirts of Paris, speaks to me wearing a
baseball cap and dark glasses. Before her
injury, she says, she “used to love jewellery
and make-up. I don’t wear the make-up I used
to and I don’t wear the kind of clothes I
used to. If I’d done something wrong, it would
be easier to understand. But I didn’t deserve
this.” Neutral observers, as she remarks,
“have said again and again that police
shouldn’t use LBDs. Nobody takes the slight-
est bit of notice. We are like specks of dust.
We don’t exist for them.”
One to one, the CRS can be quite approach-
able. An officer told me, off the record, that
the majority of his friends in the service had
little appetite for the duties they are being
asked to perform, “especially struggling with
over 30kg of uniform and equipment in
this heat”. Castaner’s Interior Ministry, at
the last count, gave the numbers of injured as
2,448 gilets jaunes and 1,797 police. While it’s
unquestionable that officers have been
hurt, the notion that grotesque injuries have
been inflicted more or less equally on both
sides – one armed to the teeth and heavily
protected, the other defenceless – seems im-
probable to say the least. The police, as any
gilet jaune will tell you, are urged to report
every scratch, bruise and even the temporary
deafness brought on by the sound of their
own munitions.
“We are never offered a detailed breakdown
of the seriousness of police injuries,” Dufresne
tells me. “What is certain is that no officer has
lost an eye or a limb. If they had, Castaner
would have paraded them in front of the
media as a matter of urgency.”
Suicide rates among French riot police are
now at a level that threatens to make 2019
the worst year on record. A report issued in
April by one national police body, the DGPN,
indicates that officers are killing themselves
at a rate of one every four days. Thomas
Toussaint of the UNSA Police union says that
the suicide figures represent a “massacre” of
officers who are working out of dilapidated
police stations and who are inadequately
supported, financially and psychologically. It’s
common for CRS to get leave on only one
weekend in five, a situation not helped by the
gilets jaunes’ weekly protests. Demonstrators
carry placards with slogans such as “Don’t Kill
Yourselves: Join Us.”Zineb Redouane, 80,was killed when ateargas grenadestruck her as sheclosed her shutters08-19FeatureRobertChalmers.indd 170 05/07/2019 13:35
164 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019