A piercing, collaboratively structured documentary that examines state violence in contemporary France through the lens of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) uprising. Rather than offering a traditional narrative, filmmaker David Dufresne builds the film around crowd-sourced footage of police brutality—videos shot by protesters, journalists, and bystanders—and intercuts them with small group discussions featuring activists, police officers, scholars, legal experts, and ordinary citizens.

The format creates a public forum inside the film itself: participants watch and analyze the footage together, debating what counts as “legitimate” violence, who gets to decide, and how the state uses its legal monopoly on force to suppress dissent. Their exchanges reveal deep structural fault lines in French society—inequality, racialized policing, class-based repression, and the erosion of the right to protest.

What emerges is not a film about a single protest movement but about the nature of democracy under stress. Through the testimony of injured protesters, unemployed workers, street medics, teachers, and legal professionals, the documentary shows how the state deploys “non-lethal” weapons (LBD rubber rounds, tear gas grenades, sting-ball grenades) with devastating consequences: blinded eyes, shattered jaws, permanent disability. The film also highlights how police violence disproportionately targets working-class, Black, and immigrant communities even outside the Gilets Jaunes mobilization—connecting long-standing struggles in the French banlieues with newer forms of mass dissent.

A central question drives the film: When a democracy uses overwhelming force against its own citizens, who decides what violence is justified? By refusing to impose a single narrative, the film invites viewers to witness how truth is contested, how footage becomes evidence, and how movements reclaim the right to document and interpret their own reality in the face of official denial.

Since the film’s 2020 release, protests in France—including the 2023 demonstrations against pension reform and repeated uprisings after police killings of young people of color—have only intensified the debate over police accountability. Civil-liberties groups continue challenging laws that restrict filming police, while new video evidence of police violence regularly circulates on social media, echoing the central premise of the documentary: that citizen documentation has become a frontline tool in holding state power to account.

The Monopoly of Violence remains one of the most important contemporary films on policing, protest, and democratic legitimacy in Europe—capturing how movements, cameras, and public debate collide in the struggle over who defines justice.