There are lies, damned lies and Gérald Darmanin. Mid-afternoon on Saturday, December 12, France’s Minister of the Interior tweeted out a figure of those arrested at a Paris demonstration against his Loi de sécurité globale. Eighty-one people had been detained. The police, he explained, had had to deal with “ultra-violent individuals”. By the end of the day he was triumphantly announcing that the total of those held by the police had gone up to 142.
What he gave no figure on was the number of demonstrators struck, tripped, thrust to the ground, repeatedly truncheoned or, in the case of some, sprayed directly in the face with pepper gel while lying on the ground
The 24-hour news channels had given us long moments of completely pacific demonstrators moving towards the Place de la Republique with rows of police in front, rows alongside them on the pavements and more behind, followed by columns of police vehicles. There were thousands – not many, many thousands – but a dignified 5,000 at least, quite likely more.
