“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” This phrase, meaning “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” first appeared during the French Revolution of 1848 and has since become entrenched in the history of France. It is part of their current constitution and is considered to be a central piece of French heritage; however, France has yet to successfully live up to this promise, due in part to deeply entrenched institutional racism. One dangerous manifestation of this racism is in the country’s policing. French police officers are more heavily armed than any other police force in Europe and, in recent years, they have also been the most aggressive. Since 2022, French police officers have killed 15 people during traffic stops. Most recently, on June 27, 2023, a 17-year-old boy named Nahel Merzouk was shot in the chest at point-blank range by a French police officer during a traffic stop in Paris. The police officers claimed that Merzouk (who is of Algerian descent) had been physically threatening them with his car; however, witness statements and video footage told a different story. According to passengers in the car at the time of the shooting, the two police officers pulled up on motorcycles next to their car in stand-still traffic after Merzouk, who was too young to have a license, failed to stop for them. One passenger claimed that the officers took turns hitting Merzouk with the butt-ends of their rifles while they threatened to shoot him. On the third hit, the witness recounted that Merzouk let go of the brake pedal, causing the car to restart. It was at this moment that one of the officers fatally shot the teenager, causing the car to continue to accelerate until it crashed. Merzouk was pronounced dead at the scene. Merzouk’s mother believes the shooting was racially motivated, having said the officer “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life.” The murder of Merzouk sparked nation-wide protests against racially-motivated police brutality. President Macron responded to the protests by employing heavy police presences, which resulted in the arrests of over 3,600 people. Still, Macron was quick to condemn the murder of Merzouk and one of the police officers involved in Merzouk’s death has been charged with voluntary homicide. However, proponents of racial justice movements in France point out that this incident is part of a larger pattern of excessive use of force by police officers in which police officers are rarely charged.
Police brutality in France has been a heated topic of discussion for years. It first became a major political issue after the gilets jaunes (meaning “yellow vests” in English) protests in 2018 and 2019, in which French workers with long commutes took to the streets in yellow vests to protest against the proposed rise in diesel taxes. The movement slowly transformed into a larger movement against President Macron’s general economic decisions, and, at its peak, 285,000 people were protesting across France. During these protests, around 2,500 protesters were injured (some losing eyes and limbs) in violent encounters with police. While this led to a smaller movement calling for a ban on police use of explosive grenades and rubber bullets, government representatives argued that this use of force was necessary because, while the overwhelming majority of protesters were peaceful, some did turn to acts of vandalism and violence. In fact, the French Ministry of the Interior reported that around 1,800 security personnel were injured in the protests. In response, Lauren Nuñez, Secretary of State to the Minister of the Interior from 2018 to 2020, expressed that he had no regrets about the use of force against protesters and stated that “Just because a hand has been torn off or an eye damaged doesn’t mean that this [response] is illegal. Above all, it’s important to make it clear that it’s not acceptable for police officers to be attacked in a violent manner by those wishing to express their convictions.” The general argument made by those supporting the police is that police officers are using an appropriate amount of force because some of the protests have turned into riots with significant property damage. They argue that police officers must use teargas and other weapons to protect themselves and to quell the riots in order to protect French society.
While some excuse the violence perpetrated by French police in response to the gilets jaunes protests as a necessary evil, others like Dunja Mijatovic, the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe (an international human rights organization), have argued that police brutality is never acceptable. In response to police violence committed during anti-pension reform protests in March of 2023, Mijatovic stated “violent incidents have occurred, some of which have targeted the forces of law and order. But sporadic acts of violence by some demonstrators or other reprehensible acts committed by others during a protest cannot justify excessive use of force by agents of the state.” French police forces have demonstrated a pattern of increasingly violent behavior, especially in regards to their handling of protests and demonstrations. From March through May of 2023, French police forces were criticized for their excessive use of force against protesters during the anti-pension reform demonstrations as some felt that the heavy police presence at the protests escalated the potential for violence. On March 25, 2023, police officers engaged in another polarizing, violent confrontation with protesters during a separate demonstration in Sainte-Soline over environmental concerns. During this confrontation, police officers launched tear-gas grenades at protesters, injuring 200 demonstrators and sending one demonstrator into a coma with life-threatening injuries. Similarly to the anti-pension reform protesters, protesters at Sainte-Soline blamed the police presence for the violence that erupted. An engineering student (referred to as David) who was present at the protests said, “This is the first time I have attended a demonstration that was this violent, but, in fact, the violence did not come from the protestors. It was violent because the police were violent.” Human rights organizations have increasingly raised alarms over police violence in France as they use aggressive crowd control tactics even against peaceful protesters. French police forces have been criticized for using weapons that are often banned elsewhere, including flashballs, grenades, water cannons, batons, and firearms. These weapons exacerbate the risk of injury at the hands of an overzealous, potentially aggressive police force.
While police forces in France have been criticized for racial biases in their application of force, this violence does not exist in a vacuum. It is heavily influenced by the larger social dynamics and stigmas present in French society, which include racial and religious biases against minority groups. In a study presented to the French national assembly by the Representative Council of France's Black Associations, 9 in 10 Black people in France reported experiencing racial discrimination. This racial prejudice manifests in a variety of ways, including in the country’s policing practices. The Défenseur des droits, an independent constitutional authority in France, found in a 2017 study that a young man who is perceived to be Black or Arab is 20 times more likely to be stopped than other members of the French population. However, these French racial biases do not only manifest in policing policies. For example, recent public discourse has revolved heavily around discriminatory educational practices. France has strict laws banning religious symbols in public schools. The French government justifies these laws by arguing that they are necessary to promote secularism; however, they have a disparate impact on Muslim students and are often said to be targeted to restrict the wearing of hijabs and other articles of clothing associated with Muslim students. Most recently, in August of 2023, the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal announced that students will no longer be allowed to wear abayas in schools. Abayas are long, loose traditional dresses worn primarily in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This decision caused outrage since there is no direct link between abayas and Islam, so these dresses could be considered a cultural item rather than a religious one. France has attempted to guard against racial biases by creating laws without explicit mention of people's race; however, this does not prevent laws from disproportionately impacting minority communities. The French police can provide information on how many people have been killed by police officers; however, they cannot provide information on the race of those victims because it is illegal to collect that information in France. The French government’s attempts to create color-blind laws ignores the realities of life in France for minorities. It exacerbates the problem of racial injustice because it strips the oppressed of the ability to quantify their oppression as a weapon to combat it.
Still, some are working to combat racial prejudice in policing. In 2021, six French and international human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Open Society Justice initiative, filed the first class-action lawsuit against French police forces in which the plaintiffs are asking for mandatory police reform. This lawsuit, heard by the Conseil d’État (the highest administrative authority in France), began proceedings on September 29, 2023. The plaintiffs argued that there is significant, systemic discrimination in police action, including racial profiling and discriminatory identity checks. On October 11, 2023, the court found that police activities surrounding racial profiling in identity checks did constitute discrimination and were not “limited to isolated cases”. However, the court did not impose measures to force the French government to end these discriminatory practices because the court said it did not have the authority to change political policy. While this decision was disappointing to proponents of this case, the court did recognize the repeated abuses of identity checks in policing as racial discrimination. This is significant because some political leaders have historically denied the notion that racial discrimination exists in policing at all. For this reason, it is possible that proponents of racial justice in France could still use this finding to force their political leaders to confront the realities of racial inequality in France and enact some real change.