Gerard Depardieu was first supposed to play the character which eventually went to Jean-François Balmer.
The extras who play the cops in uniform, during the street riots, were actually hippies whose hair was cut for most of them, but not all of them.
When the film was released in France, the gross was excellent but there were some riots because of the subject; coktails molotovs thrown by extreme right wing members.
The machine gun Sterling used in the movie did not exist in the French army, only the MAT 49.