The Even (Aftermath) of Destruction
Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix
Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. Living in what seemed like a war zone last weekend and a police state this weekend has gotten me thinking about protests in general and French protests in particular. So, for this post, I’m moving outside my normal ‘art beat’ to try to contextualize what’s been happening here in France.
I wanted to understand why in France, we always seem to be girding our loins for the violence that sabotages mostly calm balades (demonstrations) of decent people asking for help with real and often pressing problems.
Protesting has been a right in France since 1789 when the Declaration of the Rights of Man made it legal. Strikes (which are often in the transportation sector and are always called when I have to go somewhere) have been legal since 1864. Which is to say that both protests and strikes have been features of life here for a long time.
During the weekend of October 17 and 18, I watched, and maybe you did too, the streets of Paris turn into dystopian scenes of destruction. This was not shock and awe, this was shock and horror. Shock because I recognized so many places, some of them landmarks that I walk by daily, being desecrated. And horror as gangs of men clad in black roamed the streets destroying indiscriminately. It was frightening and heartbreaking to see stores and kiosks and boutiques attacked, their contents ransacked, their interiors gutted. Who was responsible for all this chaos? Why couldn’t anyone stop it, or better yet, why can’t anyone prevent it?
French citizens take their right to protest very seriously. Since I’ve lived here, demonstrators (manifestants) have taken to the streets on numerous occasions. For example, the gilets jaunes protested high fuel prices from 2018 to 2020. In 2023, demonstrators took to the streets demanding that the retirement age of 62 be retained, as the government raised it to 64. This season’s protests were started by high school students demanding better facilities and more teachers. They were joined by the pompiers (firemen) who wanted higher wages. The gilets jaunes returned, once again protested high fuel prices and also the rising cost of living. Both problems are realities thanks to Trump and his misbegotten war with Iran. Anything to avoid talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
Here in France, violence seems to be the constant companion to peaceful protests. I read the following in Le Monde about the October 17 protests, “The violence on the fringes of protests across France on Saturday is the result of the evolution of the political system during Emmanuel Macron's presidency, marked by the rise of radical parties that promote a conflict-driven vision of society and a confrontational approach.”
That might just be Macron bashing. There has been a lot of it going around. And not all of it was undeserved. Where do you suppose the President of the Republic was the evening of 16 October, on the eve of the demonstrations? At meetings with his interior minister finalizing plans for a measured police response to the protests scheduled for the following day? No, not even close. He was at a Celine Dion concert with his wife and the wife of the richest man in France, Bernard Arnault. The Macrons sang along and danced along to the concert. Some commentators mentioned how apt Dion’s theme song from the film Titanic turned out to be. I got a Nero fiddling while Rome burned kind of vibe. Paris wasn’t burning that night, but it soon would be.
The problem is not the protesters but the thugs who take advantage of mostly peaceful demonstrations. I’m not talking about the kind of pro-Trump thugs who crawled out of the woodwork, encouraged by the master thug himself, to descend upon the U.S. Capitol and try to subvert the course of democracy. No, in France I’m talking about the casseurs (the breakers, rioters), mostly (but not always) urban young men who infiltrate demonstrations and then ‘break’ everything in their path. They accompany protests, eager for destruction. The politics of the casseurs (also called black blocs) tends toward the extreme left - at least their graffitied anti-capitalist slogans do. And their targets are often the obvious emblems of capitalism - banks and McDonald's.
I got caught in a demonstration a couple years ago and had to seek shelter in the lobby of an apartment building. This time I watched the chaos unfold on my television. The running and leaping and confrontations with the police were almost balletic. I thought of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Kubrick’s thugs wear white except for their black top hats, suspenders and boots. The casseurs in France were also ready for Halloween, dressed in black with masks to hide their faces and goggles to protect their eyes from tear gas. Like saints, they carry attributes. Unlike saints who have their specific attributes (St. Lucy’s eyes, St. Agatha’s breasts, St. Peter’s Keys) the attributes of the casseurs are things like metal bars, iron rods, pickaxes, crowbars, prybars and hammers, glass-breakers and chisels and of course, canisters of spray paint. Those are the things they bring with them. Along the route, they pick up debris from construction sites and the cobblestone and paving stones that they rip up from streets and sidewalks along the way. Unlike the saints whose attributes refer to their martyrdoms, the attributes carried by the casseurs are intended to maximize damage - to store windows, bus stops, bank ATM machines and government buildings.
Of course it was awful to see the windows of elegant boutiques being smashed but the really awful scenes were of small shops that were in the path of destruction. I saw a distraught young woman, in tears, looking at the pharmacy she had made with her own hands, where she had spent six years of her life earning money to support her family. It had been violently, viciously destroyed by the casseurs. I saw footage of a big man defending his small shop. He seemed to have talked sense into the group of casseurs he confronted. When he turned around to go back into his shop, one of the casseurs, a tall, thin young man, took a flying leap and hit the store owner in the middle of his back. He went flying to the ground. It reminded me of one of the fight scenes from West Side Story.
That’s the casseurs. The pilleurs (pillagers, looters) are not the same people at all. They are mostly (but not all) teenagers and young men from the poorer banlieue (suburbs). Their dress is less standardized and they don’t always wear masks. And they aren’t holding pipes and hammers. Their attributes are bags, mostly sturdy garbage bags into which they stuff whatever they can grab from whatever stores the casseurs have broken into. According to AI, those included, this past weekend, leather handbags and wallets, silk scarves and perfumes from Hèrmes; iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and Apple Watches from Apple; leather handbags and backpacks from Louis Vuitton. At Christian Dior’s boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, after the casseurs smashed the store windows and sprayed anti-police graffiti slogans, the looters ran in and then “ran off with arms full of designer clothing, premium cosmetics, and luxury handbags before private security teams could reinforce the perimeter.”
I saw footage of young guys with empty garbage bags jumping gingerly through broken glass into boutiques and then stuffing as many handbags as they could into those bags. As they ran away, their loot fell out and onto the ground. It’s awful and also awfully stupid. High end merchandise and Apple products have serial numbers that can be tracked. The police couldn’t stop the thefts but they’re monitoring black market sales sites to catch them. A news show I watch showed a screen shot of looted make-up for sale. Another showed one left tennis shoe for sale, its anti-theft device still on it. The merchandise is hot. The thief faces jail time and buyers face a fine.
Maybe some of those pillagers were just planning to give their mothers and girlfriends presents. The kind of luxury items they see influencers on Tiktok wearing and carrying. Dolly Parton said that as she was growing up, she didn’t know how poor she was. But she and her 11 siblings were exceptions. Most Americans had televisions back then and they could watch Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, allegedly middle class families who lived in well-furnished single family homes in the suburbs. That was the reality of very few Americans. Our capitalist, consumer based society is built on people wanting stuff they don’t need and can’t afford. And now because of the internet, everybody everywhere can see what other people have. And they want it.
The irony is that the casseurs are far left wing anti-capitalists, they aren’t stealing the stuff they are ‘liberating.’ It’s the capitalistic looters who are stealing it to sell or keep.
Far-right politicians and commentators in Europe along with the obscene MAGA crowd in the U.S. are taking advantage of the aftermath of the protests in France and linking the whole sorry mess to immigration. It’s knee-jerk stupid and it’s wrong. The casseurs are French and mostly white, the looters are French and while mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent, they are the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. There has been some talk lately that the casseurs are infiltrators, terrorists hired by China or Russia or the United States, to destroy the left and assure that the far right wins in the upcoming French presidential elections.
Thanks to Nethanhanu and his side-kick, the war against the Palestinians has set up a crazy false dichotomy. While the far left has been pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel for a long time, the far right’s roots are antisemitic. The far right party which was started by the father of Marine LePen’s [the assumed nominee for president from the far right] was hostile to Israel and blatantly antisemitic. The situation is ludicrous and tragic. Someone can be against Israeli aggression in Palestine and not antisemitic. And yet that’s exactly the brush the Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have used to tar all the ‘liberal’ colleges and universities, to rid them of diversity and destroy free speech.
There was one bright note in all this but it wasn’t intentional. On Monday, 19 October, the French Interior Minister offered his resignation (as is customary on occasions like this). President Macron rejected it (of course he did, who else would want that job). The police, the Interior Minister admitted, had lost control of the protests in France. There will be an investigation. (Of course there will be, preventing it would have been better),
Later that day, after an emergency inter-ministerial crisis meeting, there was an official press briefing on the steps of Matignon (the official residence and workplace of the Prime Minister of France). At that briefing, the Interior Minister spoke about the violence, the rioting, and the looting that had taken place during the national protests on October 17. Strict emergency measures were announced, like curfews in certain areas of certain cities. But it was difficult to concentrate on what the Interior Minister was saying because in the sea of black suited men stood the petit Minister of Territorial Planning and Decentralization, Françoise Gatel. She wore what is now being called her ‘leek top.’ The next day, Yann Barthès, the host of Quotidian, my favorite news show, came out wearing his version of her top. Barthès is taller than the minister and quite frankly looked better in his version of the top than she did in hers. I guess you could say that her top wore her while he wore his top.
Mid-week, the government looking toward the demonstrations scheduled for October 24, advised small businesses to find ways to protect themselves against the casseurs! To hire a guard, maybe one with a doberman. But how is one man and a dog going to defend himself, never mind the merchandise he is there to protect, against 50 or even 5 men with pipes and hammers? So, off went small business owners to stores that sold stun guns and related paraphernalia. But as one commentator noted, it’s the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens. The alternative is anarchy or what we have in the United States, an armed and dangerous citizenry thanks to the (misunderstood) Second Amendment.
On Friday (23 October), a list was published of all the places that would be closed the next day in anticipation of the demonstrations. Among them - the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée Picasso, Fondation Louis Vuitton as well as private art galleries. The annual art fair, Art Basel, which is in Paris every October, was supposed to run through Sunday. It closed two days early and public statuary was taken down to avoid the unthinkable. If museums and art galleries can’t remain open, then what exactly does living in a civilized society mean in France these days?
The same day, after another stellar lunch at Bistro Paul Bert, this time with Franny, we stopped at Café Pause to get out of the wind (gusts over 75 km/hour) and rain. Actually, I just looked, the weather is a storm, which comes from England, which became worse when it got to France, It even has a name, ‘Storm Austen.’ We started talking to the couple who were sitting next to us. He shared lots of very distressing information about the demonstrations from the previous weekend and the upcoming one. One thing he said was that there is testimony proving that the police were told to concentrate on the student demonstrators and ignore the casseurs. They arrested many hundreds of students and took them to police stations. The students were told that if they wanted to be released they had to sign papers admitting their guilt. Those admissions of guilt would mean that they could not vote in the upcoming elections. If we can assume that students would normally vote for the party on the left (although what we assumed about young people and Hispanics in the U.S. didn’t work out).
He also said that in previous weeks the CRS ((Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) the specialized riot control and general mobile reserve force of the French National Police) mistreated the demonstrating pompiers. He also said that when small shop owners called the police and asked for help, they were told that the police were not authorized to help them. As the guy with whom we were speaking said, all of what he told us has been documented. It’s not like the 1930s when there were no cell phones to document what was happening. Whether that will make a difference remains to be seen. The extreme left is losing ground to the extreme right and the center has disappeared.
Next week, assuming the police and the gendarmes and the army’s anti-terrorist units do their job and concentrate on the casseurs and pilleurs and let the peaceful demonstrations proceed, the art of destruction will not be my subject. Gros bisous, Dr. B