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hedgehog-moss · 1 year

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Update on the French protests: we've had a well-known expert in contemporary political history call the situation we're in "the worst democracy crisis France has known since [the end of the 4th Republic]" and meanwhile the government is trying its hardest to maintain a façade of normal functioning by a) hiding from protesters, b) hiding protesters from view, and c) banning saucepans and other means of drawing attention to the protests that are being swept under the rug.

I mean casserolades are an old tradition in this country but they wouldn't have been needed if Macron &co hadn't started almost systematically banning protests in entire districts of the towns they visit and setting up police roadblocks to prevent peaceful protesters from going anywhere near them. (Too bad because these are the kinds of images the media get (these 2 are from Le Monde) when protesters get to talk to Macron <3) :

Protesters corralled away where they can be easily ignored started banging pots and pans so the protest could at least be heard in the background of TV footage, and then pans started being confiscated.

French courts have repeatedly struck down the bans as illegal but police prefects keep churning new bans out every time Macron goes somewhere anyway, trying to publish them at the last minute so there's no time for a judicial review. (I saw a sign at a protest last week that went "Stop with all the bans we no longer have time to disobey all of them")

After boldly banning saucepans by calling them "portable sonorous devices" last week, today a police prefecture banned "festive gatherings of a musical nature" in a town Macron will be visiting tomorrow. They're (ab)using counter-terrorist legislation for all this, so these days we get to read unheard-of court rulings that go like "We are suspending this prefectural decree as we do not consider festive gatherings of a musical nature to pose a significant terrorist threat to the President."

If Macron had people showing up in support I don't think we would see so many pissy protest bans because then the media could show backers vs. opponents and things would look normal (and not like 70% of the country is very pissed off with Macron). But there's not much for them to show if they don't show the angry people banging pans and it clearly rankles Macron—we learnt yesterday that he sent a letter to 200,000 political supporters of his essentially ordering them to start making appearances all over the country, to show they are "proud of what you are and of what our country has become [since I got elected]." That seems a bit desperate.

For months Macron &co have been predicting that people would get tired of taking to the streets in large numbers, and now that people are going like—right, let's try a new strategy, small local protests greeting gov members everywhere they go!—we're hearing a clear "no not like that, that's not what we meant :l " reaction from the government.

They've also been trying the strategy of announcing stuff at the last minute, like on Monday the Minister of Education announced at noon that he would visit a higher learning institution in Lyon 2 hours later, and a hundred of protesters still showed up and tried to force their way into the building. They were held off by cops using tear gas and trying to block entrances (there's a pic that made me smile, showing cops trying to barricade university gates with garbage bins—how the tables have turned...!) and the Minister ended up not showing up and moving on to the next step of his schedule (protesters tried to follow him there but police vans were blocking the street.)

The first half of the video is at the uni in Lyon; the second half is in Paris later that day. When he returned to Paris the Minister was greeted by protesters with saucepans at the train station, it's like a national relay race of protesting at times. He had to go back through the train to leave via the other end of the platform under police escort so as not to meet any protesters (god forbid).

Macron commented that this was "uncivic" behaviour and I agree, civic behaviour on the part of gov members would be to at least face the people they choose to fuck over, instead of hiding behind cops and fleeing. Obviously Macron was condemning the 'uncivic' protesters though, and the Minister said he felt "physically threatened" by the "violence of [the protesters'] speech" which is a shit thing to say considering on the same day that he was mildly inconvenienced by having to take a different exit and felt physically endangered by words, yet another protester was mutilated after being shot at by police with a rubber bullet. Not a peep about this incident (or previous ones) from the government. The Minister of Education never even condemned that time high schoolers trying to protest got tear gassed and threatened with riot guns by cops in front of their school earlier this month.

But while people continue protesting despite the actual violence from cops, our ministers are looking pretty scared of citizens banging pots and pans. Here's a list of official visits that got cancelled "for safety reasons" (saucepan terrorism) in the past week:

1. Minister P. NDiaye cancelled a visit in Lyon 2. Minister F. Braun cancelled a visit to Evrard Hospital 3. Minister Delegate O. Klein cancelled a visit in Bobigny 4. Minister Delegate O. Grégoire cancelled a visit in La Baule 5. Minister S. Guerini cancelled a visit in Castelnau 6. Secretary of State B. Couillard cancelled a visit in Rochefort 7. Minister S. Retailleau cancelled a visit to the Paris Saclay University (electricity trade unionists cut the power in the building she was supposed to inaugurate, so) 8. Minister C. Grandjean cancelled a visit in Toulouse (this article says it was probably because the visit was quite near a big highway protest where protesters among other things were building a concrete wall on a national road)

In the same bullshitting vein as "portable sonorous devices", gov spokespeople have been insisting that visits aren't being cancelled, ministers are just "adjusting the course of their trips" which is funny to me. I guess we never beheaded any royalty we just adjusted the course of their necks. I also read a newspaper article that made me laugh, that went like "Minister cancels visit; trade unions disappointed" and I thought it was because the cancelled visit was a meeting with the unions which they wouldn't get to have, but the article said it was actually because they had a good protest planned and wouldn't get to hold it...

Watching protesters mess with the government in small ways on a daily basis has been good for morale—on Twitter the hashtags #IntervillesMacron and #IntervillesduZbeul popped up (zbeul = chaos, mess, and Intervilles was a TV game show that aired for over 50 years, where French cities competed against one another in goofy challenges). I only mentioned cancellations above, but fun things also happen on non-cancelled government visits, like a Minister having to leave a building via the emergency exit because of protesters blocking the building entrance (which some people argued is worth more points than a cancellation as it's more entertaining):

Various websites were created to keep track of all these smaller protests and to officialise the point system that ranks cities on their efforts to fuck with the government:

(the first symbol means a protest, the second means a casserolade, the last one means protesters managed to get inside a building where a visit was taking place)

(Translation: Ruckus (saucepans, heckling...) 1pt Protest: 1pt Creative action (chasing minister in the woods, etc): 2pts Measures of energy conservation (= power cuts by unions) 3pts Action that leads to a political figure fleeing: 4pts Cancellation of a visit: 5pts — then there's a weighting system where the score is multiplied by 3 if it's a Minister, by 5 if it's the Prime Minister, by 6 if it's Macron.) (I also saw an interesting debate on Twitter this week—since our leaders often embarrass themselves, how should the government's own goals fit into the point system?)

Right now the Hérault department is winning because on top of protests, power cuts and casserolades, protesters greeted Macron with a giant "MACRON FUCK OFF" sign hung from a cliff (!) and took over a highway display so it'd say "Welcome to [region] Butthole Ist"

These past few days I've been discovering unknown French cities (and Ministers) thanks to them showing up in the hashtag after a good protest. I discovered a mediaeval castle I'd never heard of when unions hung banners featuring our most famous revolutionary dates from the castle's battlements. (Two days later, another protest with eloquent banners in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris:)

People are very creative—last week we heard that protesters got prosecuted for giving Macron the finger and insulting him during one of his official visits (< we are a healthy democracy), so protesters in another region tried a more sarcastic approach, and greeted a deputy from Macron's party at a strawberry fair this week with clapping and confetti and "Thank you for making us work 2 more years, thank you for police repression, thank you!" The deputy beat a hasty retreat. Then said he would file a complaint against the harassment and intimidation he had been subjected to. (The tear gas and riot guns and arrests and protest bans are not intimidation of protesters on the other hand. Or the fact that another deputy from his party recently said on TV that they were "ready for war"... They're ready to wage war, but run and hide when people clang saucepans and throw confetti.)

Anyway. I'm enjoying the fact that they can't even attend a small strawberry fair without getting heckled right now. In one of my first posts about the political crisis in March I wrote something like "How will Macron and his gov have any legitimacy to speak about any issues after this?" and it cheers me up to see a lot of people across the country agree that they have no legitimacy to talk about anything, not even the strawberry harvest.

The next nationwide protest is of course for May 1st, but in the meantime it's been really fun following the smaller protest actions all over the place. Members of government & Macron's party keep making whiny statements along the lines of this is terrorist behaviour, we can't go anywhere, why are people not getting tired of fucking with us and the answer is, because it's really entertaining!

This was the last sentence of a recent Le Monde article about Macron's situation and it has such a sinister, end-of-reign tone: