It is any given Saturday in the late 2010s and the several-hundred-person crowd has been brought to a halt along the boulevard. Fully clad officers of the gendarmerie mobile or the infamous CRS crowd control force lock shields to engulf the protesters, whose chants of “Macron, resign!” fade into “Everyone hates the police.” Without warning — despite the official requirement that riot police announce the imminent use of force — a hail of tear gas grenades land amid the throng of demonstrators. The crowd scatters, scoping out for a potential exit point amid the web of riot shields, while a few emboldened stragglers brave the stinging fumes.

For critics and admirers alike, scenes like these are examples of the French model of “preserving order.” It might seem an exaggeration to identify any particularly Gallic logic in the use of state force to break up a popular demonstration. Yet Emmanuel Macron’s ostensibly liberal government has drawn robust criticism from an array of international organizations for the way that it has clamped down on the protest movements that have dotted the political calendar in recent years.

At the peak of the gilets jaunes movement over late 2018 and 2019, the European Council warned the government about the danger — and potential illegality — of the rubber bullets deployed, which mutilated scores of protesters. In a rare denunciation of a Western democracy, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner on human rights, issued a pointed call to the French government to resort to social dialogue instead of rubber bullets and tear gas.