>
> Other videos raise questions, however. Especially this one, which has
> made the rounds on the internet and has given rise to a number of
> explanations. It takes place on the sidelines of the demonstration of
> Saturday October 18 in Paris. At the end of the march, a group of two
> hundred people, among them anarchist militants, decided to start a
> "wildcat march" retracing the path in the opposite direction. But it
> is marked by the excesses of a small group of casseurs, which attacks
> the Bastille and Opera neighborhoods.
>
> In these images, filmed by a Reuters journalist, we see one of the
> casseurs, hooded, attacking a store window. A man with white hair
> tries to stop him, but receives a kick from another "casseur" armed
> with a baton (which could be a tonfa, the baton used by the police),
> before being surrounded by four or five hooded individuals. A few
> seconds later, the man who gave the kick is filmed dispersing the
> demonstrators using his baton (read the anaysis of the video on the
> blog of Jean-Paul Moreas).
>
> The man with white hair, Bertrand de Quatrebarbes, took his story to
> Arret Sur Images [a critical TV show about the news media]. He
> explained that the "casseur" "was stunned by his intervention," that
> the kick he received to his back "wasn't hard at all" and that the
> hooded people who then surrounded him gave him "blows that weren't
> violent at all, almost fake blows, until an authoritative voice said
> 'let him go."...
>
> Finally, another piece of testimony, published on the blog of Guy
> Birenbaum, completes this version. Coming from a participant in the
> "wilcat march," he recounts his surprise when his group was able to go
> back onto the Place de la Bastille without being intercepted by the
> CRS [riot cops]. He also says he saw the man who kicked Berstrand de
> Quatrebarbes; the man asked him to "clear out" and he says he's "sure
> it was a cop." The militant also says what happened next: how the
> "wildcat march" suddenly found itself surrounded by the CRS and penned
> in near Bastille, where a part of the group of demonstrators suddenly
> revealed itself to be plainclothed policemen, "about 50 of them," he
> says. Placed in administrative detention for two days, he says a
> journalist was present in the police station where he was being held
> to film him with other demonstrators.
>
> Contacted by LeMonde.fr, "Mathieu," the militant who gave this
> account, confirms history. And he says he's still astonished by this
> spontaneous "casseur": "We were advancing down the street calmly, and
> suddenly we see this guy all by himself starting to break the window
> of a bank. It's not rational to go at it all alone, nor was it
> rational for his "friend" to disperse the crowd with his baton instead
> of going to help him....At a certain point we saw a CRS van move away
> to let us pass and then withdraw, instead of stopping us." He still
> doesn't understand why he had to spend 48 hours in administration
> detention without having done anything. Above all, he feels that he
> was manipulated by the authorities "to serve a discourse" about
> irruptions of "casseurs" in marches. The video troubled even some
> police officers themselves. On the online forum of the National POlice
> Officers Union (SNOP), user "ozoff" admits for example "that there are
> some troubling elements in this affair."
>
> Contacted by LeMonde.fr, neither the Paris police prefecture nor the
> national police headquarters was able to respond for the moment.