English riot squads may be far from
perfect, but the CRS looked, to
me, like amateurs by comparison.
Kettling thousands of people in a
vast square such as the Place de la
République, for instance, is a tactic that seems
simply bewildering. The predictable result was
panic and yet more violence.
I was present, I tell Dufresne, at the closing
stages of Acte XXV, on May Day, when the
official march, heading for the Place d’Italie,
was heavily attacked by teargas. A group of
gilets jaunes, half blind from the fumes and
suffering from acute breathing difficulties,
fled into the grounds of a hospital, La Pitié-
Salpêtrière. As they approached the building
they were chased and beaten with batons.
Some entered the premises. Anyone unfortu-
nate enough to have any experience of teargas
will understand the impulse to enter a building
that contains not only clean air but, very
probably, medical staff and equipment. That
incident happened at four in the afternoon. By
eight o’clock, Didier Lallement, Paris’ chief of
police, was being filmed at the hospital assert-
ing that gilets jaunes had attacked gravely ill
patients in a resuscitation room.
“Actually,” says Dufresene, “three of them
were there: Lallement, Castaner and Nuñez, his
deputy. At 10.30 that evening I posted the first
videos (one filmed by a nurse) demonstrating
that nothing of the kind had occurred. These
people were simply trying to escape the teargas.
The next morning, television channels were still
repeating Castaner’s version, which was pure
fiction. It took them 24 hours to start asking
questions and that is simply incredible.”
Underpinning the riots of May 1968, which
were considerably larger and more violent than
the gilets jaunes’ demonstrations, there was at
least a semblance of strategic ambition – if not
a coherent plan – in the form of a fragile alli-
ance between students and trade unions. That
movement did appear, albeit briefly, to have the
potential to overthrow the government, when
Charles De Gaulle boarded a helicopter and fled
to West Germany for a couple of days at the end
of that month. The gilets jaunes, by contrast,
are a disparate force unified by no more than a
visceral dislike of the president and his regime.
What they also seem to lack, by contrast with
the rebels of 1968, is an intellectual dimension
and, in particular, a writer, or writers, who
believe the protests could mutate into a force
capable of delivering real change and who have
the wit and the necessary influence to deliver
this message to a mass readership.
Step forward, Juan Branco. His new book,
Crépuscule (“Twilight”), a savage critique of
the Macron government and a salute to the
gilet jaune movement, is likely to be the work
that defines this period. Crépuscule spent
weeks at No1 in Amazon France’s bestsellerlist. It has been downloaded, in various forms,
around a million times and has had sales
approaching 100,000 hard copies. Crépuscule
will be republished as a Livre De Poche paper-
back this autumn.
Branco is an improbable advocate for a pop-
ulist movement given his age – 29 – and the
fact that he was raised at the epicentre of
French privilege. His CV is one that would be
difficult to render credible in fiction. As a
lawyer, Branco has served as a close advisor to
Julian Assange and was formerly employed by
the prosecutor of the International Criminal
Court. At 23, he was an advisor to Laurent
Fabius (then France’s minister of foreign affairs
and previously a socialist prime minister),
before completing a PhD at Yale. He
represented his father, Portuguese film pro-
ducer Paulo Branco, in the latter’s acrimonious
dispute with Terry Gilliam following their
doomed collaboration in the attempted 2016
incarnation of the film finally released last year
as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Juan
Branco has also found time to report on conflict
in the Central African Republic and hasachieved a top 20 world ranking in the profes-
sional sport of equestrian endurance.
He is a regular at such dazzlingly unaffordable
Parisian establishments as the Café De Flore in
the Latin Quarter. As he shakes hands when we
meet in one of that neighbourhood’s slightly
more modest cafés, I get the vague sense that I
am not dealing with a man plagued by self
doubt. “I like Juan,” one French journalist told
me. “Even if I do suspect that he sees himself as
a cross between Che Guevara and Jesus Christ.”
“I’m a traitor to my class,” says Branco, who
attended prestigious institutions such as the
Ecole Normale Supérieure and grew up in a
house where the actress Catherine Deneuve
was a regular dinner guest. With people like
her around, “It’s as well, if you open your
mouth, to have something of interest to say.”
The lawyer, who, as well as Crépuscule,
recently published another book, called
Against Macron, has become the president’s
Moriarty. “The gilets jaunes,” he argues, “are
not so much about money as they are about
Macron.” The president’s defining role, he
believes, is as an enabler of oligarchs.
“Emmanuel Macron is an arriviste. He was
fascinated by the [privileged] world hewas trying to get into. Now that he’s there,
he’s trapped. There is no way out for him. Even
if his presidency ended today, it would be
impossible for him to get a normal life back.”
The gilets jaunes, Branco argues, “are about
rebuilding democracy by allowing equal
weight to all opinions and ignoring the power
of vested interests”.
Given that numbers attending the demon-
strations are unquestionably down, I ask if he
seriously believes France is at a moment of
potential revolution..
“I believe so, yes. This is a lull in the battle.
The important confrontation is yet to come.”
I ask what form that revolution would take.
(It’s hard to detect any hint of the usual signs
of impending regime change, such as mass
defections from the army and the police.)
“I don’t know how it will happen, but I’m
sure that it will. Someone needs to offer some-
thing to the people, something concrete. We
need to avoid the mistakes of the Seventies:
nihilism and violence that lead us nowhere.”
Macron’s government, Branco believes, “didn’t
want to give a political response to a social
movement. Instead, they moved to repress it
by any means possible. It’s a miracle,” he adds,
“that there have not been more deaths.”
On this last point, at least, few disagree.On the first Sunday in June, in
the Place de la Bastille, I join
Jérôme Rodrigues, who’s taking
part in a small march in tribute to
the gilets jaunes who have been
maimed. There are a few French journalists
here: David Dufresne and his friend Christophe
Dettinger. (If you really want to give yourself
sleepless nights, you might visit Dettinger’s
site lemurjaune.fr, which is composed solely
of graphic images of wounded protestors.)
Rodrigues, at the time of writing, is beginning
a hunger strike, seeking to force Castaner to
release an official police report – completed but
withheld – into the shooting that blinded him.
Some victims are still too traumatised to come
out. Lilian, a 15-year-old mixed-race schoolboy,
has not eaten solid food since his jaw was de-
stroyed by an LBD in Strasbourg in December,
as he was leaving a sports store where he’d
been looking at football shirts that he’d heard
might be on sale. It required a six-hour opera-
tion to rebuild his jaw, which at the time of
writing is still wired together. His difficulty in
readapting to a regular existence has been such
that he has asked his family if they can move
to another part of the country. The identity of
the officer who fired the shot that ruined his
young life remains, predictably, unknown.
Jean-Marc Michaud, 42, has made the long
journey from the Ile D’Oléron, off the Atlantic
coast, by La Rochelle. He lost the use of his
right eye at a demonstration in Bordeaux >>Lilian, a 15-year-oldschooboy, has noteaten solid foodsince his jaw wasdestroyed by an LBDGILETS JAUNES08-19FeatureRobertChalmers.indd 169 09/07/2019 16:11
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