#FastAndFourrière: the National Gendarmerie, its tweets and the taxpayer
The official account of the National Gendarmerie on X today claims a little over a million followers. To this traffic are added the accounts of the departmental groupings, of the Gendarmerie spokesperson, of the Ministry of the Interior, not to mention all the institutional relays that self-cite and self-retweet in a loop. All of this is framed by a genuine doctrine, formalized notably in the Revue Défense Nationale: “staying visible and audible” in the “digital Far West”, steering, professionalizing, calibrating an editorial line. A sovereign force organized like a brand, with its engagement metrics and its centralized social listening.
In this ecosystem, one hashtag has ended up crystallizing the house tone: #FastAndFourrière. Week after week, you find the same format there: a photo of an intercepted vehicle, a speed clocked by radar, sometimes a cinematic reference as a pun, a well-placed emoji, and a little chorus of institutional accounts congratulating one another in the comments. Recently again, a 17-year-old driver on a probationary license intercepted at 187 km/h on the A20, staged with emojis and a terse line, “First months of driving and already pulled over”.
It has to be said from the outset, to forestall any bad faith in return: this isn’t about contesting the legality of these interceptions, nor relativizing risky behavior, nor defending the drivers concerned, nor questioning the road-safety mission. This mission is legitimate, sometimes heavy, often thankless, and always necessary. The subject is elsewhere. It’s in the posture the institution adopts when it decides to turn this mission into content, in the marketing sense of the term. Three slippages are at work, and each of them deserves a closer look.
The semantic slippage: from public service to “content”
A sovereign institution isn’t a brand. It sells nothing, seduces no one, doesn’t seek to build loyalty in an audience. It carries out a mission funded by taxes, within a framework set by law, under the control of authorities themselves funded by taxes. When it adopts the codes of marketing, catchy hashtag, emoji, pun, scripted staging of an everyday fact, it doesn’t make itself more accessible: it changes nature. It leaves the register of service rendered to enter that of content production.
This drift has an identifiable genealogy, which isn’t French. American police departments have, for a decade, made social media a tool of permanent self-promotion: arrest photos, official accounts parodying action films, sheriffs as local TikTok stars. The practice collides head-on with a radically opposite French tradition. The Gendarmerie is statutorily an armed force, heir to a military institution for which restraint was historically constitutive of the function. The “grande muette” (the great mute, the old nickname for the French army) didn’t tweet. Discretion there wasn’t a communication failing, it was an institutional signature. By importing without caution the communicational codes of another country, the Gendarmerie isn’t modernizing: it’s abandoning, with no public debate, an identity trait that was precisely the specificity of the French model.
One will object with the pedagogical argument: these tweets would be preventive, they’d deter drivers from speeding. The objection has a grain of truth, it’s true that displaying the reality of checks can induce a certain caution. But prevention requires neither emoji, nor pun, nor a hashtag borrowing from action cinema. You can prevent without turning the offender into a punchline. A road-safety communication campaign, austere and factual, achieves the same objective without inverting the posture: it informs, it doesn’t put on a show. The #FastAndFourrière hashtag doesn’t deter any better than a dry statement; it serves above all to burnish the sender.
What it says, by implication, is troubling: it suggests that doing one’s job amounts to a feat of arms. The firefighter doesn’t tweet every contained fire with a #BurnAndBaby hashtag. The tax inspector doesn’t post every reassessment with a reference to Catch Me If You Can. The court clerk doesn’t celebrate every summons served. But law enforcement has decided that enforcing the law regularly deserves a PR move. Yet if stopping a speeder deserves a cheery tweet, what do we save for the real investigations, the long proceedings, the major-crime cases, the solved disappearances? The systematic theatricalization of the ordinary mission ends up devaluing the mission itself.
The information asymmetry: you show the radar, you hide the report
Where the criticism becomes particularly hard to dodge is when you set this communicational generosity against what doesn’t circulate on the same channels.
The Gendarmerie communicates abundantly about immobilized vehicles, arrested drivers, filled impound lots. It communicates noticeably less, and in a noticeably more discreet way, about the internal investigations concerning it. The 2024 report of the Inspectorate General of the National Gendarmerie records 4,209 external reports and complaints in 2024, up 28% in a year. In the same year, 1,015 judicial investigations were conducted concerning Gendarmerie personnel, and 234 internal administrative investigations. These figures aren’t damning in themselves, the institution employs more than 100,000 service members and intervenes millions of times, but they exist, they’re rising, and they don’t, for their part, give rise to friendly hashtags.
More revealing still: the political scientist Sebastian Roché, in an analysis picked up by L’Essor, noted that the Gendarmerie now devotes only four pages to the use of weapons in its 2024 annual report, where the National Police, via the IGPN, devotes a third of its own. According to him, “the abandonment of the publication of statistics on shootings would be specific to the Gendarmerie”. An institution that finds several hundred tweets a year to celebrate speeding offenses could, in all logic, find a few pages to document its use of lethal force. The asymmetry is, to say the least, striking.
This asymmetry isn’t isolated, moreover. It’s part of a broader movement of locking down French judicial transparency: ten years after the promise of open data for court decisions, criminal rulings still won’t be published before 2028. What’s made visible, the check, the interception, the offender, is precisely what burnishes the institution. What’s made opaque, the report on armed force, the internal reports, the case files, is precisely what could weaken it. The distribution isn’t neutral.
To this is added, more structurally, the observation the Court of Auditors made as early as 2023 on the resources of the judicial police: clearance rates are deteriorating even as budgetary resources increase. If the Gendarmerie is keen to publish rankings, perhaps it could start with that one. Ordinary administrative quality, as experienced on the user’s side, is also not always up to the care put into communication, as I experienced myself when filing an incident-log entry (main courante). The contrast between the graphic precision of a tweet and the sloppiness of an official record ends up posing a simple question: where does the effort go?
The erosion of the bond of trust: digital chumminess as a rupture
There remains the question of tone, which is no detail. A hashtag is an act of framing, a way of designating what deserves to be categorized, serialized, memorized. By choosing #FastAndFourrière, a nod to a Hollywood saga whose very subject is the glorification of illegal driving, the Gendarmerie doesn’t opt for professional sobriety. It opts for the pop-cultural staging of its own power. It gives itself the role of sheriff and assigns the motorist that of rebel.
This narrative choice has two undesirable consequences. On the one hand, it turns the traffic stop, a moment of state sovereignty during which an armed officer interrupts a citizen’s freedom of movement, into entertainment spectacle. On the other, it installs a relationship of ironic complicity with oneself and amused condescension toward the other. You only have to scroll through the replies under these tweets: you see the accounts of the local units, of the SIRPA Gendarmerie, of the Ministry of the Interior answering one another while patting each other on the back verbally, like an office team celebrating a sales closing.
Yet this chumminess is precisely what a sovereign institution should never cultivate publicly. The distance between the State and the citizen isn’t a flaw to be corrected by digital proximity; it’s a democratic guarantee. The officer who checks an identity, sets up a radar, writes a ticket or stops a driver isn’t a comedian. They exercise a portion of the monopoly on legitimate violence. Making them likeable online is precisely to blur the line between authority and familiarity, between coercive power and the entertainment account. This doesn’t strengthen the bond of trust: it shifts it onto a terrain, that of image and seduction, where this bond no longer has a solid legal guardian.
This posture is part of a society of orders where the statutory distinguish themselves from the exposed, that is, of an arrangement where certain public bodies enjoy a controlled and flattering visibility, while ordinary citizens endure the blind spots of the same arrangement. You find the same grammar in the workings of the URSSAF, judge and party in its own decisions, or in the industrialization of paid parking through automated plate reading: each time, the public institution stages its performance, and the citizen silently endures the flip side. The #FastAndFourrière is just a particular case of this imbalance.
What we’re entitled to demand
An institution that consumes more than eleven billion euros of public money a year, whose agents carry a weapon, can deprive of liberty, check identities and, in some cases, open fire, owes the community a few non-negotiable counterparts.
First, discretion. Public service is rendered, it doesn’t put on a show. Communicating to inform, prevent, alert, yes. Communicating to give oneself the good role, no. This isn’t a question of law, it’s a question of bearing.
Next, symmetrical transparency. If the institution agrees to publicly quantify its interceptions, it must agree, with the same precision, to publicly quantify its internal reports, its uses of force, its disciplinary sanctions, its judicial implications, its convictions. All mature public-service institutions do this double exercise. The current imbalance, lots of stagecraft for the successes, lots of understatement for the difficulties, is precisely what erodes trust.
Finally, modesty. No one asks an emergency physician to tweet every successful resuscitation. No one asks a teacher to post a photo of every graded paper. No one asks a judge to publish their rulings on LinkedIn. The seriousness of the service rendered does without self-celebration. The taxpayer doesn’t need to be reassured by emojis that their money is well spent: they need to be able to verify it, calmly, through public indicators and inspection reports.
So it isn’t about imposing silence on the National Gendarmerie. It’s about reminding it of something simpler, and that military institutions can in principle articulate better than anyone: you don’t congratulate yourself for doing your duty.