The current prefect of Isère, Louis Laugier, was appointed, on Thursday, October 31, in the Council of Ministers, director general of the national police, announced the government spokesperson, Maud Bregeon. General Hubert Bonneau becomes director general of the gendarmerie.
Postponed from council of ministers to council of ministers, these appointments have become a summer soap opera. With a deadline, at the end of September, the date on which the two incumbents, Frédéric Veaux (police) and Christian Rodríguez (gendarmerie), left their positions to retire after having been extended due to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris. Finally, we had to wait a month for them to be replaced at the end of a war of succession that had begun long before the formation of Michel Barnier’s government.
Louis Laugier, current prefect of Isère, has the particularity of having also been contacted to direct the gendarmerie. This 59-year-old Parisian is not a former high command of the PJ, like his predecessor, but he knows the house well. In Isère he faced the recent wave of murders related to drug trafficking in and around Grenoble. The Grenoble prosecutor, Eric Vaillant, says of him that “an excellent overview of the issues”. He graduated from the Saint-Cyr military school, like General Hubert Bonneau. They are both from the Callies promotion.
General Bonneau is the second former head of the GIGN, an elite gendarmerie unit, to become director general of the gendarmerie, after Denis Favier, a great figure in this organization. His period at the head of GIGN (2014-2017) will be marked, in January 2015, by the search for the Kouachi brothers, Chérif and Saïd, which ended in Dammartin-en-Goële, where the two attackers of the satirical newspaper charlie hebdo They were shot down. He is 57 years old and originally from Brest. Since September 2022, he has been commander of the gendarmerie in the Brittany region, as well as the western defense and security zone.
