“Ladies and gentlemen,” the MC announces, grabbing onlookers’ attention, “we’re going to begin the third demonstration: a descent-by-rope operation. As you can see, we have two activists, suspended from a rope after hanging up a banner. Our intervention has been requested to remove this banner and take the two activists into our care.”

Two special-ops officers attach themselves to the tightrope and carefully lower themselves from the convention center’s rafters. Two hooded mock activists dangle a few meters below them. At the center of the scene: a tarpaulin emblazoned with a black-gray eagle in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle — the insignia of the Paris police’s crack Brigade d’Intervention.

“We’re going to come to the activists from above in such a way as to allow us to detach the two people,” the narrator continues. “Once an intervention’s begun . . . they’re under our legal responsibility, so we’re obliged to conduct the operation safely, both for the operators and for the activists we’re removing.”