This interests me (in a slightly off-topic way): do the soldiers really switch their service weapons to a semi-automatic model in order to patrol, or are all the rifles within the military police (etc.) semi-automatic only?
In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.
tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.
Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.
The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.
Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.
If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.
That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.