Paris is a city where people take to the streets, challenge authority and refuse to accept the status quo. But what happens when revolution is something outside your front door? For Londoners who have swapped one European capital for another, the recent demonstrations have become more than a dramatic clip on their social media feed. For them, protest means disrupted journeys, cancelled plans, police in riot gear and the unsettling sense that an ordinary day can become anything but.
Yet speaking to three Londoners who have made Paris their home, one thing becomes clear: none of them regrets the move. For Ava May, who graduated from London College of Fashion this summer and now works as an au pair for a Parisian family, the immediate impact has been on the small freedoms that make a city feel like home. The 11pm curfew around Place de la République has disrupted her social life, while transport restrictions have made familiar nights out increasingly difficult.
“The Marais, Châtelet, a lot of the bars we go to are round there, and you can’t get the Metro there any more,” she says. “Or there are police and it takes double the time it should even if you can get there. So people just aren’t going out.”
Violence and unrest has escalated in France
AFP/Getty
As a foreign resident sponsored by her host family, May has another reason to keep her distance. “I’m here on a visa so I really don’t want to get caught up in anything.”
‘Everyone is in it together’
The French girl in her care is privately educated, and is very aware of her privilege, “much more so than you’d expect from a 10-year-old, so she’s scared there will be protests outside her school. But her family are very much in support of the state school kids who started the protests. I tried to take her to a class 10 minutes from our house but we couldn’t get on the Metro. The police there started harassing me when I spoke to one of the protesters.” May moved to Paris as a lover of the city’s elegance and its culture of “sitting outside, taking things slow”. So is all this trouble making May regret her move?
“Everyone here feels like they’re in it together”
“No, because everyone here feels like they’re in it together, both my French and non-French friends. I don’t know anyone who says the protesters shouldn’t be doing this. What you see on TikTok, like people blowing up Lime bikes, isn’t what I’m seeing, which is young people gathering together without using any force. But I did just spend a weekend in England and realise how much I miss east London — there’s nowhere in the world quite like it,” she laughs. “I haven’t found my Paris Dalston yet.”
Seb Emina, a magazine and books editor, moved to Paris 13 years ago for love, lives in Belleville and now has two small children, so the curfews haven’t affected him, “as I wouldn’t be out anyway. There is quite a time-honoured tradition of where exactly protests take place in Paris, around squares like République and Bastille, although I do think it’s unusual that these ones have gone further into the city — it does feel significant in terms of scale.” On the day of the major recent demonstration, he and his family had booked tickets for an exhibition and decided to adhere to the plan, not realising how hard transport would be “when you could smell tear gas on the Metro with our kids.”
‘It’s hard not to think of 1968’
So how real do the dramatic scenes that we’re seeing on social media actually feel? “People would be surprised by how much life just continues,” says Emina. “I’ve been in town today and yesterday because it’s Art Basel Paris, a busy week culturally. I’ve seen burnt-out cars, upside down, I’ve gone to get a Lime bike and I’ve got there and it’s been melted, with maybe its GPS still working but nothing else. There’s detritus everywhere. But there are simultaneously a lot of people just going about their business — it feels like it’s just been absorbed into the texture of getting on with life. Along with the backdrop of discussions about what should happen now. The original protests seemed almost joyful. But then you get the more opportunistic side, the rioting. So it’s hard not to think of things like 1968, where what started as a student protest gained so much momentum.”
Does it make him homesick for London? “No, because Paris is so close to London I don’t even feel that much like I left.”
A couple were seen enjoying a drink close to the Arc De Troimphe where some of the main rioting took place
Paul Hardcastle
As for Dan Halifax, a software engineer who swapped London for Paris five years ago, he says thoughts of his residence permit are also keeping him from joining in the demonstrations, “which I feel bad about, as a girl from my climbing wall plays violin in a cutesy teenage orchestra and they got teargassed by the police. She was just trying to protect her violin. I didn’t see any police that weren’t in riot gear — it feels like they haven’t known how to respond appropriately and that has made things so much worse.”
“Having the right to go out and express your dissent is taught here”
Far from making him dislike France, the actions are a sign of healthy attitudes, he says. “If I’m honest I was quite anti-French before I came here. I moved because of my ex-girlfriend and I didn’t speak a word of French — I’ve improved! And I am so glad to see people exercising their democratic rights. The thing you notice in Paris is it’s not just lefties or the young — we had the retirement age protests and that was older people from the Left and the Right equally. It was amazing to see. People in London might write this off as, oh it’s just the French, they’re always on strike, but having the right to go out and express your dissent is taught here. It’s very uplifting to see.”
Sophie Heawood is a freelance writer