Confronting the Illness of Recognition: Pain and Reparation Amongst Citizens Mutilated During Protests in Present-Day France.

Since the 1980s, French police forces have used less-lethal weapons (armes à létalité reduite)-meant to neutralize targets without killing them-to enforce order. At first mostly deployed against working-class and racialized citizens living in the margins of French cities, they have been used against wider sections of the population during recent demonstrations against neoliberal reform. These weapons can cause severe injury, with longstanding physical, social, and emotional consequences. Moreover, citizens who suffer these injuries endure a stigma of criminality, making widespread social recognition of their pain difficult, which motivates them to look for acknowledgement of their victimhood in court. Based on 22-months of ethnographic research amongst people who have been mutilated or wounded with these weapons during police operations, this article is divided in two parts. In the first part, I describe people's bodily sensations-anger, tension, pain, etc.-while awaiting trial and during court hearings. I show how, much like the initial police violence, the process of waiting for justice, the events in court, and the final verdicts also become a form of violence that is inscribed on their bodies. In the second part, I turn to my interlocutors' close networks of support and care. In contrast to official proceedings, these networks allow for the refusal of socially attributed criminality and the acknowledgement and validation of their pain. I argue that they create a form of reparation that could serve as a model for a liberation medicine, a core aspect of which is the recognition of socially inflicted pain.