The protests in France last weekend were always going to be historic.
In the week leading up to October 17, there was a palpable crackle in the air in Paris, as in other major centres, such as Marseille in the south. This frisson telegraphed a collective sense of anger among the French people. Protest movements that started with high school students justifiably angry over classroom conditions led to the serious injury and even maiming of some of their number by zealous police with weapons designed to disperse crowds.
A student lost a hand, another the use of his eye. A stun grenade caused the first; a “rubber bullet launcher” the second. Dozens more have been seriously injured: broken jaws, shattered teeth.
It was these scenes that seemed to revive the ghosts of the gilets jaune – the yellow vests – who from 2018 to 2020 seized France in staunch weekly defiance of rising inequality and unfair taxation.
When I told my friend, a fellow journalist who has lived in Paris for a decade, that I intended to go to the manifestation on Saturday, she warned that even if I had the typical identification of “press” emblazoned across my person, and the appropriate credentials, it would do nothing to protect me from police brutality.
It hadn’t protected her in 2018.
In any event, I hadn’t organised my reciprocal journalist accreditation in France and had decided to go as an observer, an anonymous part of the crowd. I walked from my home in Montmartre more than 2.5 kilometres, along Boulevard de Magenta in the 10th arrondissement and towards Place de la République, a crowd growing thicker as we neared the square guarded by the symbol of the French republic, Marianne, soaring 25 metres above the ground.
The energy was magic. So much of Parisian life is lived, by design, on the street for all to see. Democracy here has been practised as a living thing on this very public stage for hundreds of years. Balzac often wrote of Paris as an organism, a monstrous thing with streets that took on human characteristics – some noble, some of disrepute, others still being decided by history – and its people as part of this grand creature.
In one of my favourite lines, he lamented that some progress in national affairs was often too slow for the French, “for whom a merely gradual success is equivalent to a fiasco”.
And so, they manifest with profound urgency. Not for them the empty political rhetoric of reform. Like Balzac’s Parisians, classes he likened to the concentric circles of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the protesters on Saturday were unified in anger if not always in cause.
Students met at the sanctioned start with calls for better amenities and teaching conditions, especially in the poorer banlieue (suburbs), where inequality strikes more fiercely. They were joined by the yellow vests, unions and farmers, alongside other groups supporting Palestine and those with a general call to end fascism.
“This is France, we’re always breaking shops and public buildings. It’s not that unusual. But there is a code.”
It did not matter that this was the approved meeting place imposed by the police prefecture in Paris, nor that the vast majority of the 150,000 people who attended in the city, and between 550,000 and 800,000 nationwide, were there with peaceful intentions. The tear gas found many of us.
The gendarmes fired round after round, creating plumes of foul gas that followed the wind first west and then south and then back again. I had managed to make it to Marianne and there was no violence where I started, but people were being felled by the gas regardless. Certainly, I was not at all prepared. Everyone else was.
A line in The Australian’s front-page report on Monday bristles with ignorance that might have been mine on another day: “But the marches turned violent, with gangs of people who had planned for clashes using face masks, goggles …”
This is nonsense.
With very few exceptions, the thousands of people I saw had all arrived with face masks and goggles, not because they “planned for clashes” but because this wasn’t their first French protest. To even attend the sanctioned protest in the location approved meant exposure to the gas. It was my first time experiencing the pure disorientation that follows repeated dustings.
What began as a mild irritation, from which the crowd would attempt to flee as one, later ended with a frightening few minutes where I had copped a dose so severe I was totally unable to open my eyes, except in painful bursts that revealed nothing of the world around me because tears flowed as torrents. My breathing became sharp – childhood asthma – and the crowd moved around me in sharp changes of direction, like starlings.
I was stranded and afraid.
A kind protester saw me spinning around and steadied me, offering me, un étranger with a camera and only passable French, some saline eye drops. Another gave me a mask. The community of the manifestation is remarkable.
Tear gas, my journalist colleague tells me, sinks down into the Metro stations. And so it did on the weekend. Tourists, mothers with young children and babies, and the elderly were all struck, and they weren’t even going to the protests.
Like Balzac’s Paris, there were distinct groups among those who did go.
When the bus stops along Place de la République were first smashed and then set on fire, I was in a portion of the crowd usually referred to as the casseurs: the breakers.
I watched as they smashed their way into a Franprix supermarket and began tossing fruit, drinks and baguettes out into the crowd. They raided the store so thoroughly that within an hour most of it seemed to lie on the Rue Beaurepaire outside. Then they moved on to a chemist and began smashing the apartment building itself with projectiles, aiming for the windows of the homes above.
You will by now know the rest of the international story.
In central France, the 150-year-old Limoges town hall was torched, burning à la Notre Dame on live television feeds. Near the Canal Saint-Martin, where brutal summer heatwaves turned Napoleon’s project into a green-tinged swimming hole for some of the poorer youth within the old walls of central Paris, cars were set ablaze.
In these moments, the police were nowhere to be seen. I was in the area for hours and never once saw any response to the damage as it was being carried out. I don’t know what tactical reasons supported this, but the result was that all effort was made to suppress a peaceful protest but none was made to stop the damage, including to terrified shopkeepers trying to protect their businesses.
It’s worth noting that, where I was, most of the damage was directed at large chains and corporate businesses, but this was not universally the case.
When the celebrated French pompiers (firefighters) arrived to put out the burning bus stops, the crowd around me, including the casseurs who had just lit the fires, began chanting, “Thank you, thank you, thank you to our firefighters.”
In one brief moment, a few rogue members of this mass attempted to block the fire truck from moving through, and they were set upon by the rest of protesters. Cheers erupted as the pompiers doused the blazes that had been set.
Elsewhere in France, there were a couple of examples where pompiers were physically attacked and it was this, not the burning buildings or the looting, that seems to have most shocked a union of political persuasions across the movement and those looking on from outside.
“This is France, we’re always breaking shops and public buildings,” a French barista tells me two days later. “It’s not that unusual. But there is a code.”
Nevertheless, October 17 was a seismic day. In part this is political, as President Emmanuel Macron becomes an ever more reviled figure in France ahead of the presidential elections to be held from mid April next year. But that does not explain all of the gravitas that attached to these nationwide conflagrations.
Another French friend of mine – young, pissed off and with family from the former French colonies and protectorates in Africa – has been dealing with tourists expressing their otherwise innocent shock at the destruction of historic buildings since the weekend.
“Of course people are going to destroy those fancy buildings – their lives are shit,” she says. “These kids have been abused by the police since forever. People genuinely do not understand the weight of racism, classism and just being poor in a capitalist society.
“Their goal is to keep you poor, uneducated and brutalised,” she says, referring to the intentions of governments and capital. “The fact that people don’t understand that this drives people insane is bonkers.”
The framing, too, that this is somehow an immigrant problem, denies an essential fact about French history. Even Macron, in his address to the nation about the “unbridled violence”, asked a question to which he already knew the answer.
“How can French people do this to France?” he said. “Nothing justifies it, nothing explains, nothing excuses it.”
So says the man whose national holiday, justly, celebrates the storming and subsequent destruction of the Bastille. So says the man whose people also burned and destroyed another town hall in Paris in 1871, since rebuilt, and the Tuileries Palace that once formed the final wall of the enormous Louvre complex, now gone forever.
Even in a cost-of-living crisis, this rhetoric is cheap.
The French aren’t buying it.