It had taken us five hours to get there, driving up through the mountains via cliff edge roads that dotted with gendarme checkpoints.
It had taken us five hours to get there, driving up through the mountains via cliff edge roads that dotted with gendarme checkpoints.
Jacques Bruneau, the Prefect of Allier departement, set up a roadside tribunal d'exception to get quick action with his gendarmes disguisoed as tourists sitting in unmarked cars but equipped with radior to warn the police farther on whom to flag down.
Did you hear the military is meeting with the gendarmes?
He arrived to see the oldest son, Christopher, 22, with the gendarmes as they stood in protective suits breaking up a big block of concrete.
International forensics teams are working with mountain gendarmes, but accessing the slopes to locate the remains often involves abseiling down by rope to inspect the debris in detail.
Le Bleu led the way, with the gendarmes trailing behind, and after a few minutes we arrived at the bloated yellow corpse of a man whose legs had been gnawed away by dogs.
The film charts the fortunes of the bright young members of France's "high-school movement", fighting running battles with the gendarmes before lighting out on a freewheeling fugitive jaunt across Europe.
The bungled burning-down last month of a beachfront restaurant in Corsica, by members of a special police squad claiming to have acted on orders from above, has already led to the sacking and detention of the prefect in charge of Corsica, Bernard Bonnet, the government's top representative on the island, along with six gendarmes.
The world's greatest bike race travels along the world's longest one-way street: 2,500 miles of closed roads around France lined with impassive gendarmes and screaming cycling fans, an interminable sens unique which always ends on the Champs Elysées.
