The war against the French police is just getting started

Last Saturday in Paris a police officer leapt from his car and levelled his handgun at a baying mob. The thugs backed off long enough for the policeman and his colleagues to make good their escape.  

The chief of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, praised the officer’s ‘sang-froid’ in successfully extracting his team from a dangerous situation. The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau took a different view, describing the policeman’s behaviour as ‘unacceptable’. 

She made no reference to the moments leading up to the confrontation, when masked men with iron bars and steel-capped boots attacked the police car after it had strayed too close to a left-wing anti-police rally. 

For Britons of a certain age, the footage was reminiscent of an awful day in March 1988 when two British soldiers in civilian clothes and in an unmarked car inadvertently drove into an IRA funeral procession.