Maurice Grimaud: MAURICE GRIMAUD, who has died aged 95, is best known for trying to limit police brutality during the student and workers' uprising of May 1968, when he was prefect of police in Paris.
One of the main characteristics of the May events was, indeed, police violence, vividly captured in the press photographs and footage of the time, featuring riot police beating demonstrators. But Grimaud strove to restrain the aggressive inclinations of many policemen and senior officers and, in a letter sent to all Parisian police, he wrote: “Beating a demonstrator on the ground is like beating oneself, and brings the entire police force into disrepute.”
That the May uprising did not become a bloodbath is often attributed to Grimaud's close attention to what was happening on the ground, including discussions not only with police in the streets but also with groups of protesters. (He later revealed that some of his own children took part in the demonstrations.) He also tempered the highly repressive inclinations of the Gaullist government, persuading ministers not to recapture the occupied Sorbonne and Odeon theatre by force, and arguing against more brutal police tactics in the second nuit des barricadesin the Latin Quarter on May 24th.
When Grimaud became prefect in Paris in 1967, he was aware that, as he once put it, “the police I inherited were marked by a culture of violence”. His predecessor was Maurice Papon, later condemned for crimes against humanity for his wartime activities in Bordeaux. Papon was prefect in October 1961 when police killed more than 100 Algerians after a peaceful demonstration (a massacre that was covered up for many years), and a year later when, in February 1962, nine demonstrators died at Charonne metro station during a police charge.
Grimaud’s approach to the job bore no resemblance to his predecessor’s. As a young man he had been deeply affected by the 1936 march on parliament by the extreme right, which had left 17 people dead and about 1,000 wounded, and by the counter-demonstration three days later organised by socialists and communists, in which 15 died and 1,500 were injured.
Born in Annonay in the Ardèche region, Grimaud obtained a degree in literature but just failed to get into the elite École Normale Supérieure to pursue further his passion for the subject (this was “the biggest disappointment of my life,” he wrote later). Instead he joined the civil service and was posted to Morocco, Algeria and Germany, then the Landes, Savoie and Loire regions of France before being appointed prefect in Paris for four years. Under the socialist president François Mitterrand he worked in the interior ministry, the ministry for economic planning and decentralisation, and for the government ombudsman.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the student leaders of the May 1968 movement and now an ecologist MEP, met Grimaud for the first time in 2008 in a public discussion. Responding to Grimaud’s death, Cohn-Bendit said that although he had been “on the other side, he was someone I admired a lot”, adding that Grimaud had protested against Cohn-Bendit’s expulsion from France in 1968.
Grimaud wrote three books about his experiences, including one, published in 1977, describing May 1968 from his perspective, entitled En Mai, fais ce qu'il te plait("In May, do as you please").
He ended his 2007 memoir Je ne suis pas né en Mai 68("I was not born in May 68") by expressing regret at not having been more directly engaged in the political turning points of his lifetime, commenting: "A life is as unpredictable as it is impossible to correct." He is survived by his five children.
Maurice Grimaud: born November 11th, 1913; died July 16th, 2009