Research on the police in Mai '68 began in May 1968. Sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, who lived in the Quartier latin, distributed questionnaires about police conduct to other local residents the morning after the first Nuit des barricades (10-11 May), writing up the hundreds of responses in 'Ce n'est qu 'un début' (Labro et al. 1968; 88-118; Zancarini-Fournel 2008, 20). Student and teaching unions, l'Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) and le Syndicat national de l'enseignement supérieur (SNESup), issued a press release on 16 May inviting anyone with information about the recent events to come forward: 'toute personne susceptible de fournir des renseignements de quelque nature qu'ils soient (témoignage oral ou écrit, enregistrement, film, photo, etc. …) relatif aux événements du quartier latin depuis le vendredi 3 mai à 12 heures, est priée de se mettre en rapport avec les comités d'enquête aux adresses suivantes' . As police archives show, the copy of this press release was marked up by an intelligence officer in the Paris police, in its entirety, in red pencil along one side, and the phrase 'comités d'enquête' was also underlined (PP FB 35). While accusations of police brutality levelled by students and residents had appeared in the national press as early as Saturday 4 May, the day after the first May rioting (Joffrin 2008; 89), the idea that evidence was to be gathered in a systematic way to support these allegations by victims and those aligned with them clearly caught the eye of police intelligence. As well it might, for by mid-May although surprisingly there had still not been a single death in Paris or the provinces, officers had unleashed ferocious repressive violence against demonstrators whose refusal to recognise the authority of the regime embodied in its street-level functionaries was felt, from de Gaulle down, as an unpardonable affront akin to the crime of lèse-majesté, and which called for harsh and summary punishment: 'la police rendait la justice sur le terrain, immanente, distribuant les peines à coups de matraque, sous des nuages de gaz lacrymogènes' (Rajsfus 1998, 14-15).The first publication resulting from the work of these comités d'enquête (UNEF and SNESup 1968) set out a litany of prudently anonymised accounts of police brutality, including the matraquage of a woman resident not involved in the demonstrations while she was carrying a one-year-old baby (15), attacks on passers-by, among them elderly people, who intervened to try to protect demonstrators (15-16) and on tourists (16); stories of demonstrators repeatedly beaten while lying on the ground and unable to get up (24), as well as of a police officer who threw an unknown white liquid at a young woman who was subsequently hospitalised with severe injuries to her eyes and lungs (27). The prominence given to police violence against women demonstrators in that volume cannot be dismissed as merely a paternalistic