Let’s go back to one of the moments that marked the week: the hearing of some of the presidential candidates by the Alliance police union. Valérie Pécresse, Marine Le Pen and Gérald Darmanin, who represented the Republic on the move, responded present. But it is especially the speech of Éric Zemmour which marked: the latter simply assumed the hypothesis of a civil war. The word is strong. But now it seems justified.
To understand this, you have to start by looking at what Éric Zemmour says about police violence. For him, it’s not that they don’t exist: they can’t exist. “The President of the Republic himself, in an interview with Brut, talks about police violence, thus explains Éric Zemmour. There is no police violence: the police have, according to the great phrase of Max Weber, ‘the monopoly of legitimate violence’. There is violence against the police, yes, and it is increasing.”
Thus, the police would have the monopoly of legitimate violence, and therefore any use of force on their part would be acceptable. The expression “police violence” would have no meaning. Is the reasoning rigorous for all that? Not at all: this is a statement based on a totally biased reading of Max Weber, one of the fathers of sociology, which all social science students are supposed to study. To begin with, Éric Zemmour quotes him very badly: according to Weber, it is not the police who have the monopoly of legitimate physical violence, but the State. The police are only delegates, in the same way as the military.
But above all, this sentence, Éric Zemmour reads it backwards. It does not mean that all physical violence exercised by the state would be legitimate, but that the only violence that can be considered legitimate comes from the state. Under what conditions? As soon as the violence proceeds from what Max Weber calls a “rational legal legitimacy”, that is to say as soon as it is exercised in compliance with rules and laws. Outside this framework, the violence of the state loses all legitimacy and becomes unbearable: this is precisely what is denounced under the name of “police brutality”.
Éric Zemmour is not the only one to reject the term police violence. Indeed, Gérald Darmanin too, or even Christian Jacob, believe that, in general, the police demonstrate a proportionate use of force, while admitting slippages. But by diverting Max Weber, Éric Zemmour, he comes to deny the theoretical possibility that police violence can be illegitimate.
And it is not a hazard. With Éric Zemmour, this interpretation supports a deeper project. Let’s see how he talks about those the police have to deal with, that is to say the delinquents: “The analyzes have shown that there was a continuum between everyday offenders and those who ended up being jihadists at the Bataclan and elsewhere. All of these are the same people. They come from the same origins, from the same neighborhoods, they the same sociological journey. I would say that some do jihad and that others do jihad in everyday life.”
“There would be a continuum between terrorism and petty crime…” We could dwell on the basic argument used by Éric Zemmour: both have the same origins and come from the same neighborhoods. It comes down to looking at individuals for what they are, rather than what they do. It is the origin of the offenders that would determine the seriousness of their acts, rather than their acts themselves: this is of course highly debatable, to say the least. But above all, let’s see what consequences Éric Zemmour draws from this: “You don’t have to deal only with delinquents, you are at the forefront of a conflict of civilizations that has spread on our soil. There are two civilizations on our soil and they cannot, unfortunately, coexist peacefully. This is why it is absolutely, imperative to support you and give you the means to protect and defend yourself and gain the upper hand.”
If the offenders are in fact “everyday jihadists”, then, the mission of the police is not only to maintain order, but to impose itself in a conflict of civilization. And for “take over”, all means will be good, including the most brutal since, let us remember, there can be no illegitimate police violence. Especially since, in previous statements, Éric Zemmour has been clear about his desire to leave all the institutions that guarantee the fundamental rights of individuals: whether it is the Constitutional Council or the ECHR.
It is necessary, I believe, to have the courage to call things by their name. Éric Zemmour is not content with prophesying a civil war: he organizes the conditions for the repression of a whole section of the population, on the basis of the supposed belonging to another civilization. We can’t say we didn’t know.