Do you speak English? a desperate, youngish man asked the bulky police officer looming over me, “We are just tourists.” He and his partner were lost, as they probably should have been since touring in a France that is meant to be in lockdown seems a ridiculous thing to do, but then everything at that moment was completely ridiculous.
Here we were in a street that circles l’Etoile, the vast roundabout in Paris that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe. It was Saturday evening, the sun was beginning to turn the monument a slight pink behind the officer, and the demonstration against President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to stop photographs of police violence was coming to an end.
The officer appeared to be the boss of a mobile motorcycle patrol of some twenty bikes, with a passenger officer on each vehicle, that had a few moments before roared passed me up the Avenue Foche toward l’Etoile looking for some possible act they could do in support of “l’ordre publique”. This BRAV-M is the brainchild of Didier Lallement, the sour-toned Prefect of Police for greater Paris whose role in Macron’s drive to “defend Republican values” has been to make life more painful for those wishing to protest against the President’s favourite policies.
