“It was like a gory movie, every Saturday on TV, with limbs torn off, people having an eye put out.” For lawyer Arié Alimi, the state response to the gilets jaunes demonstrations was a shocking display of police brutality. The movement protesting Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal government met with “a level of police violence previously unseen in modern French history,” confirms Amnesty International’s Anne-Sophie Simpere.

When the gilets jaunes revolt began on November 17, 2018, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to barricades and roundabouts across France, police had initially seemed overwhelmed. “I thought it was the revolution,” says Youri, sitting with a group of fellow leftist activists from Montreuil, eastern Paris. His comrade Julien remembers a Paris deserted by the police: “There was no more state, the street was ours, not a cop in sight; we could roam through the whole city, we thought we were hallucinating.”

But if in the very first days of the movement the authorities vacillated, before long they turned to crude repression. Week after week over the next year and more, the gilets jaunes took to the streets — and the police met them with increasing brutality. “Only” one person was killed, but hundreds were left with serious, even permanent, injuries; over eleven thousand people were arrested; and at least several hundred are still in jail. Through their response, French authorities introduced new norms of judicial repression — both dramatically and permanently restricting the room for democratic protest.