Bruno Donnet 10:43 am, March 23, 2023

Every day, Bruno Donnet watches television, listens to the radio and scans newspapers and social networks to deliver his telescoping. This Thursday, he is interested in the communication of the government and Emmanuel Macron concerning the violence on the sidelines of the demonstrations.

Every day, Bruno Donnet questions the media factory. This morning, he chose to focus on the use that is made these days of images of police violence in demonstrations.

Every evening, on the sidelines of more or less wild gatherings and garbage fires that put the police on the teeth, short video sequences, captured by the smartphones of the demonstrators, flood social networks: "Go stand up! Break yourself! Come on, get up, big bacon. Bag goes. »

On it, a policeman hits a man lying on the ground and calls him a "". And on this one, an official shoots a protester with a LBD, a defensive ball launcher, telling him: "Come on, pick up your balls!"

These images, if the traditional media have not recorded them, themselves, they nevertheless broadcast and popularize them, at long air lengths.

The day before yesterday, for example, France 2 had chosen to devote a long report, in his 20-hour newspaper, to these controversial sequences: "Here, a policeman hits a man in the face. There, police who bludgeon people massed in front of the terrace of a restaurant and who have no threatening gesture. »

Faced with the colossal number of these videos of brutality, and faced with the indignation they arouse, the day before yesterday, the prefect of police of Paris, Laurent Nunez, even went on the set of BFM-TV to recognize that, yes, excesses had occurred: "Very honestly, when we see this sequence, yes the gesture seems inappropriate. "

And to say, with a very interesting formula, that he was extremely attentive to these excesses: "Everything we see, all these videos, we analyze them obviously, it is my duty to ensure the ethics of the police. "

That, then, is the interesting phrase, "police ethics". Because just after the prefect of police, it is the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin who, in front of the cameras, used exactly the same: "Obviously if police officers have committed acts contrary to ethics, they will be punished, as I have been doing since I became Minister of the Interior. "

In short, as you have understood, the day before yesterday, the executive recognized that slippages had indeed occurred and wanted to let us know that it would not tolerate them.

However, since yesterday, there has been a change in the government's communication.

Yes, a quite spectacular shift Philippe that occurred, at 13 p.m., in the middle of a presidential interview.

Because imagine that Emmanuel Macron, too, has bounced on these images. But now, he chose to use them a bit like one would in judo, that is to say, trying to use the strength of his opponents to turn it against them: "We can not accept neither the factious nor the factions. "

Because the images circulating on social networks also show arson, damage, or demonstrators who provoke the police and insult them.

Then? Well then the president of the republic chose to bet on these. And, he opted for a new element of language: "When groups use extreme violence."

He condemned "extreme violence" and compared those who demonstrate at night to rioters, supporters of Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro: "When the United States of America experienced what it experienced, on Capitol Hill. When Brazil has experienced what it has experienced, when you have extreme violence in Germany, in the Netherlands, or sometimes in the past here. »

So, it's clever, because it allows Emmanuel Macron to designate an opponent: the factious. Much easier to disqualify than if he attacked the majority of French people who are hostile to his reform.

And then it also allows him to appear as a guarantor of order, of republican order, that is to say to place himself on the side of political democracy, at a time when the unions, and the opposition, accuse him of passing over social democracy: "When they use violence, without rules, absolute, because they are not happy with something, So there, it is no longer the Republic. »

The fact remains that staging the threat that the demonstrators would pose to the "Republic" is a bold political gamble. Power therefore plays images against images. But he is now on a tightrope, tense, in a very uncertain position, because no one can say on which side opinion will eventually swing.

Judo is an art that is at least as martial as it is perilous.