That seems to have been the tipping point, but Macron has relied on police brutality to suppress protest to his austerity torture policies for years. That he is now making any effective criticism of his goons illegal sadly doesn't surprise me at all. It is entirely in line with how that asshole operates.

Did France seriously just start going full fash after the attacks?

It started before that - roughly since the last local elections (at the cities scale), where their party got its ass handed to it and the green party did very good scores. I think they're afraid of the next presidential elections as a result, so they're having the usual neoliberal reflex: go full fash.

Mind you, I imagine they're also expecting social troubles that'll make the yellow vests look nice by comparison given the upcoming economic depression, so they also might be trying to have cops on their side as much as possible. That specific part of the law has been a request of cops for years; it's absolutely asinine, and has been condemned even by right-wing newspapers in France and by countless human rights organizations both in France and elsewhere, as well as by the UN. The debates around the law itself were a joke. The law comes right after months of protests and countless instances of police abuse being published on the web at the same time - the idea here is clearly to prevent cops being filmed in general to hide such instances of violence.

Also, see that "with malicious intent" in the tweet above ? yeah, well the text of the law itself says (roughly) that publishing those vids with malicious intent towards the "psychological integrity" of cops is enough for it to be an infraction. So basically any cop can say he felt threatened and he has at the very least grounds for attempting to sue.

I should also mention that this is only a small part of a terrible law: among other things, it also makes access to drones and their footage much easiers for cops, as well as access to video surveillance footage in general. It also permits cops to go to enclosed public places with their weapon even when outside their working hours - so with that law, a bar cannot refuse entry to an armed cop even outside that cop's working hour (which is batshit insane).

So yeah, this is much, much worse than even those tweets suggest, and an incredibly worrying development here. Related political cartoon (the rooster is roughly saying "that wind from the right is muddling my face").

Even if it wasn't false flag, they had all this shits prepared waiting for an excuse like this.

Edit: yeah ok the first incident was surely real, but projecting that fucking cartoon in response? really?

Seems like it. Let's see how that's going to work out for them.

It's also because Macron saw the mass protests and decided the best way forward is totalitarian oppression.