The French police are the subject of much controversy these days. They have always faced a certain amount of opposition, sometimes of an extremely radical nature. Here’s an example from 110 years ago.

In 1910 a cobbler called Jean-Jacques Liabeuf went on a bar-crawl near Les Halles, then the site of the markets that kept Paris supplied with food. At his last port of call, just before 8.00am, Liabeuf brandished a knife with a 20-centimetre-long blade and announced that he was going to “rub out” at least two cops that day.

The police were duly called and two officers grabbed him as he left the establishment.

But they screamed with pain and let go of their target, who had wrapped leather sleeves packed with nails around his arms, concealing them beneath the cape he was wearing.

He than ran off to a neighbouring building, pursued by the police officers. There he stabbed one of them, Célestin Deray, eight times, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest and the stomach.  He stabbed the other, Constable Fournès, in the throat, also injuring three other cops who arrived before being himself stabbed with a sabre and taken to hospital. A crowd of onlookers had formed and tried to lynch him.

Deray died from his wounds.

Framed as a pimp

I came across this story on a fascinating Facebook page devoted to recounting aspects of the history of Paris through images.

Predictably, given the debate currently raging about law and order, the post inspired a number of comments along the lines of “People were already attacking law enforcement then”.

But another reader gave us an idea why Liabeuf was not too enamoured of the constabulary.

Born in Saint Etienne, he had come to the capital after serving several short prison sentences and being sent to fight in France’s colonial adventures in Africa.

In Paris he met and fell in love with Alexandrine Pigeon, a prostitute whose pimp, Gaston, was a police informer.

He was arrested, along with Alexandrine, by two members of the anti-prostitution police and after a trial which his lawyer did not bother to attend – he sent a message to the court that he was busy eating his lunch – jailed for three months for living off immoral earnings.

At the end of his sentence, Liabeuf breached an order not to return to Paris, was arrested and served another month in jail.

It was after that sentence that he came to Paris again, convinced that he had been fitted up and determined to avenge himself on the cops who had sent him down. He did not find them and Deray and Fournès paid the price of protecting their colleagues.

Riot in the shadow of the guillotine

Unsurprisingly, Liabeuf was condemned to death. But, at a time when police were used against striking furniture-makers and railworkers, his case became a cause célèbre for the French left, with radical papers pointing to the injustice of his previous conviction and the apparent corruption of the officers who arrested him.

President Armand Fallières having rejected a petition calling for Liabeuf’s pardon, a crowd of about 10,000 – including Lenin, Picasso and French socialist leader Jean Jaurès – turned out on the morning he was due to be guillotined.

A number of demonstrators were arrested or injured in clashes with the police and, after an anarchist shot a cop while trying to free Liabeuf to the cheers of the crowd, the prefect sent in the cavalry, with sabres drawn. The wounded police officer, part of a brigade specially devoted to tracking anarchists, later died.

So the police were not particularly popular with those sections of the population most likely to be on the receiving end of their attentions, often perceived as using arbitrary violence in defence of an unjust social order.

Police station attacked

That’s also true today.

The only police station in Champigny-sur-Marne, where I live, has been attacked three times, twice this year and nationwide the number of attacks on police rose 14% in the first nine months of this year.

Some 96 officers are reported to have been injured at a demonstration against the government’s proposed security law last Saturday.

But, then again, so were a number of demonstrators and journalists at that protest and at a violent police raid on an improvised migrants’ camp last Tuesday. They have not received a phone call from Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who says he has spoken to most of the injured cops.

And so was Michel Zecler, a black music producer, beaten and racially insulted by police who followed him into his studio in Paris last week, apparently with the intention of fining him for failing to wear an anti-Covid mask.

And so were about 30 people who lost either an eye or a hand during the Gilets jaunes demonstrations in 2018, nor the demonstrators clubbed or teargassed on protests against changes to labour law in 2016, not to mention an ever-growing number of banlieue residents, usually belonging to racial minorities, who have been insulted, chased or beaten by the forces of the law.

Many of these assaults came to light because they were filmed, a procedure the government, under pressure from right-wing police unions, means to make more difficult with the controversial article 24 of its security bill.

Here’s an illustration of why that is a bad idea.