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France Diary 2018-2020 (You Think American Police Have a Tough Time)
I don’t know what kind of lunatic would ever open a store in Paris these days. And if you think American police have a tough time let me tell you, French police are so martyred that I have taught my children to smile at them in the street, and they wave to them from the window of our apartment.
On a Saturday in the fall of 2018, the gilet jaune (Yellow Jacket) riots started, initially in reaction to the carbon tax which President Macron imposed. Don’t let the mainstream media tell you it was some “normal French striking thing.” It continued very intensely, every Saturday afternoon for about a year, across the country, and not only in Paris but in all the major cities: Lyon, Toulouse, Lille etc. Macron tried to be highhanded and ignore it for about a month or more until finally, he had to give an official speech to the nation.
Here’s what it was like on the ground: At the very beginning, I, very pregnant, ran out in the morning before lunch to get wrapping paper (for Christmas) and luckily chose to go to the branch of Monoprix (a kind of high-end Target + supermarket) which wasn’t on the very big boulevard. There was a lot of agitation and by the time I got back to the house, things were in full swing, and we were essentially under siege in our apartment until evening. The protesters, to whom my husband and I felt sympathetic initially, were mostly middle-aged people from the middle-class suburbs, and they wore the yellow vests the government requires people to keep in their cars. But somehow right away the hoodlums from the rough suburbs (not wearing yellow vests) joined in for the ride and destroyed things in their wake. Graffiti, burning and destroying cars, newspaper kiosks… They even entered our little street and we watched from the windows while they overturned a dumpster and burned it. We were actually quite alarmed so we went upstairs to visit with our neighbours and the kids were put in a back room so they couldn’t watch. I remember thinking “The French Revolution must have been like this.”
That afternoon, the rioters turned on a high-end children’s clothing store on our street, and welding the electric scooters that are parked everywhere, they systematically smashed the unbreakable glass windows, and looted the place entirely top to bottom, saying “Vêtements des bourge!” (rich person clothes) and passing out trash bags full of loot in the street. The store remained closed, as did many stores, through the Christmas shopping season, finally reopening three weeks later. It was utterly destroyed with a vengeance.
The next morning, Sunday, I did a grocery shop and surveyed the damage. It was, for me, like the Blitz or something.
So this continued every Saturday afternoon for a year: burning and looting. And so what normal people did was this: you scurried out to do your shopping and errands in the morning, before lunch, and then you took shelter until evening.
Gradually (relying on my memory here) it stopped being citywide (meanwhile people in other French cities had other situations: I am talking specifically about Paris here) and the Gilet Jaunes would announce where they would be (I think French law requires this of protesters). So they would be at Place de la République or avenue des Ternes, and you would plan your day accordingly so as not to be stuck in the rioting.
I gave birth at the end of December 2018 and I remember my obstetrician coming in to see me in my hospital bed, complaining that she couldn’t get to her hairdresser.
Three months later, I was at the hospital across the Seine because of complications with my scar, and I tried to take a taxi back to my side of the river and was stuck in the taxi on the bridge for about an hour or more.
Four months later, we went to brunch at some friends’ house, after having first verified where the “manifestation” would be that day. “Good – they are on the other side of the neighbourhood today.”
In the mornings, people came cautiously out of their homes to look things over. The Haussmanien buildings all had been tagged with graffiti: “Manu, j’ai traversé la rue” (Manu, I crossed the street). “Manu” is the diminutive of Emmanuel, and it was in the news because the President scolding a high school boy in a crowd for calling him “Manu” instead of Monsieur le Président. Then “crossing the street” part came from this typically tone-deaf encounter the President had with an unemployed man who complained that he couldn’t find a job. The President, who really is somewhat autistic in these situations, told him he had only to “traverser la rue”, “cross the street” and the phrase trended on Twitter for days, reappearing in the form of graffiti all over the country during 2018-2019.
They burned out the fancy restaurant Fouquet, where Sarkozy infamously celebrated his presidential victory years before, as well as the poor newspaper kiosk at the corner. The poor man who worked in the kiosk told the Figaro newspaper mournfully, “I make 900 Euros a month. Why me?”
My family came to spend Christmas with us in December 2019, a year later, and by this time the RATP and SNCF were on strike for two months because of the retirement pension reforms pushed by Macron so there was no public transport (another blow at the holiday season to commerce), and people worked from home or walked to work if possible, and the public school lunchrooms were closed because the employees couldn’t come to work from the suburbs, AND the gilet jaunes continued to march every Saturday. Many people couldn’t get to see their families on Christmas because the countrywide trains were blocked and canceled. The SNCF has a policy where you can retire at 55 (I believe) on full pay and given people’s lifespans, you will end up retired longer than you will be working! Most French people I talked to found this scandalous.
Again, we had to take taxis to the church so the kids could rehearse for the Christmas pageant, and watched from the window while the protesters and riots moved past. By this time, the movement had shifted to include people waving Palestinian flags, the usual effigies of the President, as well as, bizarrely, climate protesters (even though the initial protest had been against a carbon tax), the usual stuff about rich people etc. My kids stood at the window waving first at the protesters than at the police in riot gear following them. And there were police armoured vehicles and trucks stretching all the way in the distance. It was again, very dramatic, for Americans from the midwest such as my parents to see.
In the midst of all this, we are still on terrorist alert, so this is all very amusing for the police and military, who since Charlie Hebdo in 2015 have been on alert, and we see trucks full of the military going by on “vigipirate”.
Then we had the lockdown, which started here on 16 March (just previously, the President and his wife had encouraged the French people to go to the theater!). Soldiers were deployed to try to get “the 93” (Seine-Saint-Denis) to stay in their houses, and there was frequent violence with the usual suspects, hoodlum kids, roving the streets, attacking ambulances and firefighters and police, who were trying to enforce the lockdown. The usual.
There was a “lone wolf” terrorist attack with a Sudanese migrant, predictably called Abdallah Ahmed-Osman, who, for reasons inexplicable to most French people, had been housed and put in a job training programme in a little town called Romans-sur-Isère, stabbed two French people to death and wounded four others waiting in line at a butcher shop while yelling “Allah Akbar”. This made hardly a blip on the national media (unlike, say, George Floyd, thousands of kilometres away!), and was quickly explained as Abdallah being “sick of being locked down.” The poor guy. By the way, there is a Twitter feed called FrenchLivesMatter. I invite you to check it out. It condemns the violence inflicted on French people on a regular basis by the people the government or the EU has decided to invite in to share our generous big state benefits.
Soon after this small and unimportant episode, there was a crazy lady yelling on my quiet, affluent street all morning. (I actually think she lives around here because I have seen her before). My kids rushed to the window. Then two Vigipirate trucks of soldiers came by, and seeing her yelling, they stopped. (Since the trivial incident with Abdallah’s lockdown frustration, they were clearly tense.) Both cars stopped and 8 heavily armed soldiers stepped into the street and called out to her, questioning her. Eventually, they were satisfied that she was harmless, and started to get back in their cars. My kids were waving at them from the window and they smiled and waved back. Then I had a great idea and ran to get this big French flag that François Hollande had urged French people to purchase and put in their windows after the “Charlie attacks” in 2015. We all agitated the flag furiously in the window and the soldiers were very pleased and I felt good all week. They don’t get much thanks, soldiers and police in France, and I am not sure they get to avail themselves of their obligatory 5 weeks of vacation per year. If anyone works like crazy in France, it’s them.
Published in Foreign Policy
Thanks for the view from your window.
What a terrific post, right from the spot, and beautifully written! Thanks, this is Ricochet at its best. Great job, Tocqueville.
I love how these weird things get started.
Wow! Thank you. Cri de cœur!
I thought that Macron had finally backed down on the carbon tax. If so, why are the Gilet Jaunes still demonstrating? What, if anything, will bring peace?
They did more than move the goal posts. They changed the game! It seemed to have morphed from a badly needed honest opposition into the stupidest French tendency, known to bubble under the surface of everything since 1789: anti-richness.
Did the weekly rioting stop for covid-19?
Yes. Except in “the 93” as we call that suburb which is always full of marauders. They never could get them locked down. It’s sort of a permanent Minneapolis. And it gets especially festive for football matches and New Years Eve.
Terrific post! I accidentally ended up in the middle of a gilets jaune protest in December of 2018, the first time I went to Paris, and the weekend that they had begun gassing protestors. It was already getting quite bad, and I had to kind of push and shove my way to the front to beg a riot officer, who was more heavily armed than any police officer or even military personnel than I had ever seen in person, to let me go in French because I was a dumb American that got trapped by accident. That was one of the single most terrifying experiences of my life, and I ended up walking something like 15 miles in total that day because the metro was shut down and I was forced to make all kinds of weird diversions to get back to my hotel after police started blocking pedestrian roads. I had read about the 68 riots, and knew that France had a reputation for quite bad ones, but nothing compares to seeing it in person for three days straight.
@kirkianwanderer is too modest to say that she wrote a fine post about it.
Another great post. You are off to a roaring start.
Yes: the story of my life summed up by @kirkianwanderer:
“Loving Paris is a very good reminder indeed that man is not wholly rational; any schemes for his perfectibility should take into account coexisting gilets jaunes and an indelible love of the Seine before they set out to save the world.”
well said !
The part about the news vendor was so, so sad. As is the case in the US, rioters don’t care whom they hurt.
This is such a great post. So much to unpack. The business about the climate change people joining in a carbon tax protest was hilarious.
Coming soon to a city near us, if it hasn’t already!!!
@tocqueville, this is a totally eye-opening post! I had no idea things had gotten so out-of-hand over there. You wouldn’t know it in the U.S. because our news people are obsessed with racial division and Donald Trump.
Five years ago, my wife and I made a purposeful stopover in Paris on our way to Israel. I am a professional artist and we wanted to see the Louvre Museum and the Museum D’orsay. The biggest thing that struck me about Paris was the train ride from Charles DeGaul Airport into downtown Paris, my very first look at the country. The train ride was in my estimation, about 20 miles or so. The whole route was lined on both sides of the track by somewhat densely-packed buildings.
There was graffiti on the buildings. There was graffiti on ALL the buildings. There was graffiti on ALL THE BUILDINGS FOR SOME 20 MILES. It was so pervasive that I found myself looking for some building that was not grafftied. I don’t recall ever finding one. I even tried looking past the initial row of buildings lining the tracks and saw more graffiti on the buildings behind them. To accentuate this landscape, every so often we passed a huge pile of garbage on either side of the tracks.
When we got to the center of Paris, of course everything was beautiful, but what I saw on the way in was disturbing. Graffiti and garbage by itself is harmless. However, it is indicative of a decaying society, or worse. It is a clear sign that there must be something awful going on beneath the surface of what had been known for centuries as a showpiece of High Western Culture. I came away thinking that Paris had a very thin veneer of sophistication that covered for an underbelly of rot and decadence. Am I wrong?
Hi Steven, it wasn’t a false impression! I think it is really dirty and I hear Parisians muttering similar things. Stay tuned because I am thinking of writing a post on Paris’ lefty and unpopular mayor Anne Hidalgo, who belongs up there with Di Blasio, Lightfoot, the Minneapolis guy and Sadiq Khan. The subway trains are all deeply tagged as well, which they weren’t when we moved here permanently in 2010. There is a crack problem and a metro station has ben cancelled. Reminds me of NYC in the 1970s-80s, when my parents left, to which we can add the problem of Islam.