Since the middle of March in France, 1,247 Gendarmes, police and fire fighters have been injured in the line of duty. There have been over 2,500 deliberate acts of arson and around 350 buildings have been vandalised in some shape or form.
Forty-seven of those gendarmes were injured on Saturday March 25 when they were attacked by a large and well-organised army of environmental extremists at Sainte-Soline in western France, some of whom came from Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The previous October 61 gendarmes were wounded at the same location.
Television footage of last month’s violence showed the extremists advancing towards the gendarmes in a well-drilled military manoeuvre, throwing Molotov cocktails from behind shields. Four police vehicles were destroyed by the militants’ bombs.
Yet according to the protestors and some of their sympathisers in the media, they were only hurling Molotov Cocktails in self-defence. Similar claims have been levelled at the police during the protests against the government’s pension reform bill; yesterday in Paris 77 police officers were injured, 13 of whom required hospital treatment, as protestors sacked a bank and set fire to a restaurant in which Emmanuel Macron once dined.
Online petitions to disband a rapid reaction police force has garnered over 260,000 signatures and the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has accused the police of excessive violence.
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