In France, Chauvin Conviction Has Not Brought Comfort

BOBIGNY, FRANCE - The trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin made headline news in France. But much of the reporting about the trial, and its underlying themes of police violence and racism, largely zoomed in on the United States.

“I think it’s viewed as an American problem with some resonance in France,” said Steven Ekovich, a U.S. politics and foreign policy professor at the American University of Paris. "It also feeds into a certain strain of French anti-Americanism, on the left and on the right, so that the French can moralize about the United States, and its difficulties and its flaws,” he said. That wasn’t the case last year, when George Floyd’s death caused many French to look inward. They joined spreading global protests for police accountability.