Nuñez before the deputies: the 'failure' of policing order, and then what?

According to Libération, Laurent Nuñez was questioned at the National Assembly by the commission of inquiry into 17 October. The occupant of Beauvau, the Interior Ministry's Paris headquarters, justified the mass use of weapons capable of maiming, even killing, against protesters who were sometimes minors. The paper's headline speaks of a minister confronted with the "failure" of maintaining order. The dispatch we have is thin: we do not know the detail of his arguments, the precise toll of the injured, or the conclusions the commission will draw. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

That reading rests on one question the hearing poses without formulating it: whom does this apparatus serve? A minister who comes before the national assembly to explain why weapons that blind and tear off hands are needed is not describing an accidental drift. He is describing a doctrine. When the "failure" of maintaining order becomes the official confession, one may ask which order is meant, and for whom it is maintained.

We know the liturgy: a commission of inquiry, a polite minister, firm questions, rehearsed answers, then the report that gathers dust. It is parliamentary theatre at its most comfortable. It gives the impression that power is accountable, when it merely comments on its own accounts. Rosa Luxemburg mocked the opportunists of German social democracy who dreamed of a class struggle reduced to a duel on the podium, from which the street would be banished. She saw in this the illusions of petty-bourgeois democrats. The spectacle of a chamber debating grenades while the street receives them would, alas, prove her right.

For the core is not technical. The question will not be settled by a better policing scheme or by additional training. Should a reform of doctrine come, it will be judged by a single criterion: does it strengthen the confidence and power of those who mobilise, or does it demobilise them in exchange for a cosmetic calm? Concessions wrested from power are taken back as soon as order demands it, and a left content with that would end up managing the truncheon instead of setting it down.

There is one point we would like to hear more about: the presence of minors in these marches. A young generation that takes to the streets and receives in return weapons called "sublethal" learns something, and it is not civility. Luxemburg saw in mass mobilisation a school where one learns by acting. The state, too, dispenses lessons, and it gives them with the flash-ball.

We will therefore wait to see what the commission dares to conclude. In the meantime, the admission of failure is a fine word: it suggests the problem is one of method, when what has been decided is to treat the entire street as an enemy.