SAINT-ÉTIENNE, France — On Saturday, during a day of nationwide protest, the French security apparatus detained 1,200 members of its own species and published the figure the same evening, exact to the unit. In this city, one protester lost a hand. The hand does not appear in the figure. We stayed the night to observe how a number travels when a hand does not.
In Paris, clashes broke out and two unauthorised processions were dispersed. In Lyon, incidents were recorded. The evening tally, form RT-1, the Evening Custody Return, itemised the detained by nothing except their total. We counted its columns: eleven. None of them is a hand. When the species cannot explain a day, it counts it; the counting is performed at dusk, in a calm voice, and functions as a comfort behaviour.
‘The 1,200 is verified twice before release,’ said Évelyne Roussel, deputy coordinator of nightly verification at the Interior Ministry. ‘The public must be able to rely on the number. A hand is not a line on the form. If the form had a hand column, we would complete it. The form does not have a hand column, and a new form would require a form.’
The republic’s president, Emmanuel Macron, summarised the day in one sentence: ‘Whoever has destroyed will be punished.’ The sentence is six words long and counts its subjects in whole persons. The owner of the hand was taken to a hospital, an institution that maintains a waiting list, which is the queue of the queue; the owner joined it. No list was announced for the hand. It cannot sign.
At 08:12 the next morning, we took position 4 in a bakery queue on the rue de la République. Between 08:12 and 08:41, the queue of eleven produced nine repetitions of the figure 1,200, four of the word ‘punished’, one query as to whether the tally included minors — it went unanswered — and zero mentions of the hand. At minute nine, the queue produced its first apology, offered to a stroller that had done nothing. At minute twenty-one, its fourth, offered to a man who had asked the price of the bread. ‘They count what they take. What comes off is other paperwork,’ said Gérard Fontaine, 71, a retired tram driver at position 7. ‘One thousand two hundred is solid. You can build on that.’
Observation closed at 08:51, when the queue reached the counter and turned, as one, to the subject of a parking space. The figure was mentioned twice more. Both times, it was correct. We checked. The apology tally closed at seven. The hand was not mentioned again. Our final field tally for Saint-Étienne: one figure, verified twice; one hand, verified by everyone who saw it, and by no form. You can build on that.