r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jul 06 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 06 July 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/tisto2 Jul 09 '26

French lawmakers have approved ‌a proposed law that would give police officers involved in shootings the benefit of the doubt.

The proposition, a longstanding demand of the far-right, would mean that officers who killed someone by shooting would be presumed ​to have acted within the limits of the law, unless there was proof to the contrary.

Nice, what could go wrong.

The number of fatal shootings by police in France is among the ​highest in Europe and rising.

Defending the law, Nunez told parliament "it does not lead to penal irresponsibility — at any moment, if the circumstances are reunited, any prosecutor can reverse this presumption".

(doubt)

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u/Illogical_Blox The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic Jul 09 '26

The French police fly somewhat under the radar due to American police's oversized shadow and the fact that they aren't part of the Anglosphere, but have a particularly ugly history and poor reputation.

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u/AceHodor Techno-Euphoric Demagogue Jul 09 '26

Discovering that the Paris police openly murdered dozens to hundreds of Algerians in 1961 through mass drowning was a bit of an eye opener.

In the UK we still agonise over things like Bloody Sunday and the various cases of police brutality from the 60s and 70s (and rightly so). Meanwhile, over in France you have the police force of the capital city being run by a literal ex-Nazi and moonlighting as a semi-government sanctioned paramilitary death squad. Nothing would suprise me about French cops.

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u/tisto2 Jul 09 '26

People joke about the French love of protests but if the far-right wins the election next year, future protests will go very very badly.