Revolutions - Supplemental: The Streets of Paris

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Au revoir Paris.

And welcome to revolutions. Supplemental. The Streets of Paris. By the time you hear this, I will be gone. We moved to Paris in the summer of 2018 so that I could write hero of two worlds. Now three years later, the book is finished and we are flying home. There's more to say about living in France than I can possibly fit into a short piece like this. Family life and work life, all the funny things and the hard things and the joyful things and the crushing things.

all the things. But since this will be going out on the Revolution's podcast feed, it felt appropriate to leave on a very specific note. Because, boy, have I talked a lot about the streets of Paris, the mobs of Paris, the crowds of Paris in 1789 and 1792 and 1830 and 1848 and 1871. In these three years that I've been here, there was never a full-blown revolutionary event in the streets of Paris, but I saw some things. And so I thought I'd share some of those impressions, some eyewitness accounts of what it was like to be swept up and carried along through the streets of Paris by a bunch of Parisians.

And if you go to Revolutionspodcast.com or follow me on Twitter, I've managed to dig up some pictures or video from each of the four things I'm about to talk to you about. So be sure to check that out because I was there. I saw some things. The very first mob action in the streets of Paris that I participated in was actually just a few days after we arrived. We moved to Paris on July 11, 2018, and just a few days later was Cotours Jouillet, what the English-speaking world erroneously refers to as Bastille Day. This is a date that plays a huge role in Hero of Two Worlds, by the way, as the first great celebration, the Fet de la Féteracion.

on July 14, 1790 was the height of Lafayette's fame and influence and popularity. But though it is purposefully linked to the memory of the fall of the Bastille, Coutre's Jouill, going all the way back to 1790, is not a celebration of revolutionary chaos or popular direct action, but of post-revolutionary order and peace. This post-revolutionary order and peace is visibly represented and enforced by citizens' understanding. arms under the direction and control of the state. Now, since the Third Republic revived the

celebration in 1880, the day has been marked by and defined by a military parade down Chamzalise to Plastela Concord. The political and military leadership of France make a formal show of observing and overseeing and saluting carefully choreographed columns and displays of military arms and discipline. Crowds line the streets, but are kept well back from these well-disciplined columns. It is all very formalized and ritualized, imposing on the 14th of July a positively Napoleonic spirit. We watched this on TV and saw the military planes fly overhead. Now, none of that is the first mob action I took part in during our stay in Paris. It all actually happened the very next day, and I only told you that just to set up a nice little contrast,

because I participated in something far more spontaneous and emotional and uninhibited, though no less nationalistic in spirit. Because the very next day, July 15, 2018, France based Croatia in the World Cup finals. That morning we got up and walked down the streets, which were packed with people. There was anticipation and electricity in the air. Every cafe and bar and restaurant and shop had huge flat screen TVs facing the street. crowds of people huddled around each screen jostling for a view, ordering food and drinks, talking, smoking, laughing, arguing, and drinking. There was a lot of drinking.

I personally wound up, lodged in an alcove next to a crepary, adjacent to Sontra-Pompidu and the Stravinsky fountain. They hung up a TV in front of a phalanx of plastic chairs, and it seemed like as good a place as any. I wasn't there nearly early enough to get a seat, but where I was was slightly elevated, and I had a good view of the TV and a clear path to the guys working hard and fast, dispensing beer and wine and food. As the game progressed, France scored some goals, and people went

crazy. And then Croatia scored fewer goals. And people started looking at the clock and looking at the score, and they started to get very excited. There was spontaneous singing of songs, and everyone automatically knew all the lyrics to all the chants and all the songs by heart, and I had never heard any of them in my life, but I did get to know them pretty quickly. In the final minutes, it became clear that France was going to win this game, and it turned into a giant party. It's like nothing I have ever seen. This isn't just a championship.

This is like the most important championship of any sporting event in the world, I think. When the final whistle blew, everybody went crazy. There was hugging and shouting and cheering and chugging. and then without any prompting or any direction, like a bunch of homing pigeons, disengaged from whatever TV had captured their attention for the last two hours and began walking west. The surface tension of these little group pockets broke, and they merged with each other, and they formed bigger pockets, and then people started streaming towards main streets. I hit Boulevard de Sebastopol, just in front of Leol,

and then everybody turned left and joined this might as much. mighty tributary of humanity now headed south. We were swept down river into Rue to Rivoli, where this watershed of national emotion drained into this arterial road, and we all marched towards Postela Concord. All of this was wildly chaotic and joyful. There was yelling and screaming and high-fiving and hugging and kissing. It was a delirious whirlwind. Nobody ever stopped moving. Nothing ever stopped swirling. People clung to the side of building. and hung out of windows and swung from lamp posts. I mean, not like that, but you get the drift.

We emptied into a sea of French enthusiasm in Postola Concorde. It was where every other river in Paris dumped everybody else who wanted to joyfully party, and it was just a giant, happy, cheering mass of people. The World Cup celebration in the streets was no less an expression of patriotic nationalism then the July 14 parade I watched on TV just the day before. But the happy spontaneity of the people who broke into Lamar-Sayez, and they were constantly breaking into Lamar-Say-es, was not carried off by some military band,

but just a bunch of people screaming at the top of their lungs. Sometimes they'd forget the lyrics, but they were always there for the Marchand-Marshan part. It was heartfelt and pure. There were no hierarchies here. There were no differences or cleavages or conflicts. All of it was overlooked in a very drunken, and it was a very drunken embrace of shared victory.

It would not be for a few days yet that idiots on the talking head TV shows would insist on exposing the civic myth of colorblind French citizenship by wondering aloud whether a team made up of so many players of African heritage, Mbapap, and Conte and Pagba, could really be considered a French national team. But that wasn't for a few days. I didn't have to hear from those idiots quite yet. I walked home deliriously happy among deliriously happy. happy mobs. Four months later, the same streets were packed again, but this time with energy that is far more familiar to us here at the Revolution's podcast. The mobs coursing through central Paris in the fall and winter of 2018 were just as spontaneous and leaderless as the World Cup crowds had been, but instead of delirious joy, they were driven by angry hostility, confrontational defiance. They were fed up, they were mad as hell, and they were not going to take it anymore.

all of them wore yellow vests, and so they were called the Gilles-Jean. The protests started out in the provinces, not in the capital, and when they finally did come to the capital, it wasn't the Parisians rising up. It was a bunch of protesters descending on Paris to protest in Paris and in part protest against Paris. They were amorphously angry about the rising cost of living, stagnant wages, and an anti-elite anti-establishment feeling. But everything snapped into place when President Macron proposed a new gas tax. This was right on the heels of eliminating a capital gains tax, and it looked a lot like Macron was going to be lifting the financial burden of the rich and powerful, while imposing

a greater financial burden on the French outside the metro areas who relied on their cars. and outside the metro areas, France is a very car-dependent country. So finding each other on Facebook and social media, groups started protesting the tax, and then they got it in their heads to start blocking roadways. And they identified each other and then identified the movement by donning the yellow safety vests that every French motorist is required by law to carry in their car. These are the yellow vests. These are the Gilles-Lijon.

In November, the decentralized Gilles-Jealé-Jean movement decided to start holding holding coordinated national protests. The first of these demonstrations was on November 17, 2018, and included perhaps 300,000 people across France, blocking roadways and marching through cities. There were clashes and accidents, a couple hundred wounded, and a few deaths. We were still new to France, and not 100% plugged in what was going on out there. And the following Saturday, November 24th, Mrs. Revolutions went on one of her long runs, as she does every Saturday morning.

Little realizing that a planned pleasant jog over to Chamzileuze, the Arc de Triomph, and Eiffel Tower was carrying her right into the middle of what was about to become global news. The Gilles-A-Jean were supposed to confine themselves on that Saturday to the Chom-de-Mars. That's the deal they had worked out with the authorities. But they seemed to have no intention of actually following through with that. They were here to defy, not comply. And so they ignored the cordons and they flunded out onto Chomsalise. Mrs. Revolutions found herself in the middle of a pack of protesters, kind of out of nowhere.

And this was all curious enough, and she took a picture, and that's on the website. But then suddenly a police van roared up right in front of her and unloaded a company of police in tactical armor, like a helicopter offloading a platoon into the middle of a war zone. These guys rushed out. They mobbed into the mob, grabbing and tackling people as everybody scattered to avoid contact with the police. and Mrs. Revolution's quite literally ran home. What else could she do?

And then we watched the rest on TV clashes all over the west end of the city. And this was just Act 2 of the Gillesjean protests. Act 3 was on December 1st, and this time Paris prepared. Shops closed down and started boarding up their windows. The police mustered in full force. But the Gillesjean had momentum, and they were winning. Polls showed that they were far more popular than McCrone was, and the anticipation delivered. That day there were more clashes.

There were torched cars. This is the day the Arctic Triumph was vandalized. They poured out in uncoordinated streams heading every which way, and the police were unable to stop them from spreading out across the city. Eventually, they made it to our neck of the woods over in the moray by the Hotel de Ville, and marched right under our window. Now, mostly, this was just yelling and chanting and demonstrating. but there was a healthy dose of window smashing and fire lighting along the way. The next Saturday, Act 4, we were all told to stay indoors, which was more of the same and was now international news. Now, it was never as bad as some of the images and video that was going out there might have made it look like.

It did look like Paris was literally engulfed in flames and there was mass rioting. It was never that bad. But I did take a video one night of the clouds of tear gas. and smoke from burning cars and the flashbangs and the fighting all happening right outside our window. It did all happen, and I did capture it with my own eyes and with my own camera. But as I was just looking through these pictures, I was reminded how much life can otherwise be normal, even in times of great social upheaval, because in between the pictures and video that I took on December 1st and December 7th, there's just a bunch of pictures of me and the kids at some Christmas village activity just living our lives.

lives, just cute, normal family activity in between these Saturdays of insurrectionary chaos. It's weird, but that's how these things go. The Gilles-Jean never quite ended, even as the energy dissipated amidst that same Christmas holiday, because the French do love to protest, but they left their holidays more. But when they came back after the New Year, they kept at it. And every Saturday they kept at it, and even after it stopped being global news, they kept at it. eventually becoming something of a vigil, a ritual in its own right that never explicitly or formally died. And by September 2019, like almost a year later, they were up to Act 45, the 45th consecutive Saturday of some kind of Gilles-Jean protest.

Over the course of all this, just shy of 2,000 people were injured, there were about 1,000 police injuries, and about a dozen fatalities. And it never did end. It just changed and transformed. and was then swallowed by much larger events. Almost exactly a year after those initial early clashes with the Gilles-Jean, we get the next big street action at the end of 2019. One of President Macron's other big ideas was unifying and streamlining the retirement and pension system, the details of which are far too esoteric for us to worry about here.

But what is important is the powerful transportation unions recognized any such unifying and streamlining would make their plans worse. And they weren't wrong about that. It was also generally recognized among the unions that this was part of the ongoing hammering of a neoliberal wedge into the oak of French social democracy that had taken root after World War II, but which European elites have been trying to chop down since the end of the Cold War. The announcement of pension plan reform led to union mobilization in November of 2019, and where

the Gilles-Jean had been leaderless and decentralized, this would be a classic, highly organized, coordinated, and disciplined strike. I personally attended three of the big marches. I would go link up with them at one of the big rallies at Plastela Republic. Then we would march down to Plastella Bastille on our way to Plastella Nation. This goes right through the heart of the old Sancelot district of the French Revolution. Now, I have been to protests before, big protests, little protests, but in my life, I have never seen a turnout of marching demonstrators like I saw in Paris during the transportation strike

of late 2019. There were so many people. And I would walk among them. I would stop and they would keep coming. I'd walk some more. I'd turn around. They'd just keep coming. It was just an endless river of people.

The atmosphere was all very happy and party-like atmosphere. It was much closer to the world. World Cup celebrants than the angry Gilles-A-Jean. There was drumming and musicians and dancers and singing and chanting and waving and cheering. I saw the musicians of the Bastille Opera House sing La Marseillaise, which was by far the most beautiful rendition of a song that they always sing at all of these things no matter what's going on. Mostly, though, it was just a lot of people walking and chatting. There were obligatory signs depicting Macron as Louis XVI.

And as we marched down the pre-arranged route, there would be cops in riot gear on side streets, making sure that nobody strayed off course. Now, amidst the crowd, there were the black block kids, the anarchists who were there to vandalize things and cause trouble. And one time I did get caught up with a group of about a dozen black block kids to my right while a bunch of police and riot gear were off to my left. And I realized for a second, I am right in between a bunch of anarchists and a bunch of extremely pissed off police officers. And so I just stopped and let them go on because I'm just a humble history podcaster and I didn't want to get caught up and all that.

Now, nobody knew in December 2019 that this was going to be the largest transportation strike in a generation, the largest in 35 years. I mean, it was big and it shut the whole city down, but then it just kept going. It just kept going and going and going. Now, off and on, since we've been here, there have been various union staging one-day demonstrations or other sort of performative work stoppage actions, but this was not like that. Macron dug his heels in, the unions dug their heels in, and it just kept going, day in and day out, weekend and week out. Now, everybody predicted it would be over by Christmas, because again, the French don't want their protests to mess with their holidays. And it was also kind of

assumed that unions would not be willing to take the PR hit of canceling everybody's vacations just to keep this going. Now, eventually, various unions did start dropping out and the government agreed to do this or that. But to be honest, by February of 2020, after this had been going on for about three months, it was still ongoing. And it only stopped when it disappeared into the gaping maw of COVID. And that changed the streets of Paris in completely unimaginable and unpredictable ways. In February of 2020, we were going into the third month of pretty disrupted life, thanks to the transportation strike.

And the news started paying more attention to this virus in China, especially when the first confirmed red dot in Europe showed up where else, but in Paris, the most visited tourist destination in the world. That makes sense. And we didn't think much of it. It was an idle curiosity. But then Italy just started getting consumed, overrun. They went into this national lockdown, which seemed insane. And the general mood in France was, well, you know, of course the Italians screwed this up, not like us.

We're too smart for all of that. a few weeks later, we joined them. Lockdown officially started on March 17th, 2020, and it was effectively a 23-hour-a-day confinement. You were allowed to leave your domicile for one hour of exercise activity per day, plus whatever necessary trips to the grocery store or pharmacy one might have to make. You were not allowed to travel more than one kilometer from your house. And so there we were the four of us. Mrs. Revolutions, my son, age seven, my daughter, age four, confined to a 500-square-foot apartment,

23 hours a day. Now, I had a book to finish at this point, and so I spent a lot of that time drafting the original manuscript of hero of two worlds while listening to ocean crashing or heavy thunderstorm, white noise sounds just so I could tune the world out. And when you get to the part in the book where Lafayette and his wife and children, are confined to a prison in Olmutes. Please just know how semi-autobiographical that part is. But we settled into a routine where my wife and I would each take one kid with us for an hour of outside time and then the next day switch.

This would just give everybody a break from everybody else for at least a little bit. But everything was closed. All the parks, all the green space and the playgrounds, all of it was closed. And so I only count myself as supremely lucky that we were within one kilometer of this send so we could at least get something resembling fresh air and a little bit of nature. When I was with my son, we would walk down in front of the Hotel de Ville, then cross the river and turn right, and walk over to the Palais de Justis and the conciergerie and then come back. With my daughter, we would walk down but turn left. We would cross over Pont-Louis

to the tip of Il-S-Louis, then go across Pont-S-Louis behind Notre Dame, which, oh yeah, Notre Dame practically burned down while we were here. We saw those flames taking down the spire from our window. Man, we've seen some things. Anyway, we would then circle back around across Pontarkole. And since COVID started, I have walked that route across those three bridges so many time. It is crazy. That is really, truly like what Paris is to me right now. Because even at this point, we're on third lockdown. We're not really supposed to be going anywhere or doing anything. But here's the thing. I have been talking these three previous times about instances where I was in the streets of Paris when it was full of great teeming throngs with yelling and clanking and crashing

and shouting and drumming and smashing, this blaring sea of humanity, whether they were angry or related or mad or glad. But this was different. This was not like anything anyone has ever seen before. There was nothing. There was nobody. It was devoid of human activity. I am talking about the very center of Paris, devoid of human activity. Now, when we would go out, we would see a handful of other people out taking their little walks or whatever. But there were no cars. There were no groups. There were no boats or barges in the river.

There were no scooters. There were no trucks. There was no construction. There was no chatter. There was no cafes. There were no shops open. Nobody was sitting in front of anything. Nobody was going into anything.

Nobody was coming out of anything. Nobody was jostling into anybody. There were no planes overhead. It was just this great abandoned city. It was so quiet. It was so unbelievably quiet. You could hear birds chirping. It was positively post-apocalyptic.

It was something out of a movie. Just being alone in a giant abandoned city. It was like a neutron bomb had exploded. Now, during this first lockdown, police were out there checking papers. First, we had to carry physical copies, and then later they gave us an app we could use. And a lot of these police officers were on horseback. So that too was extremely surreal experience. You would have this digital application on your phone that you would have to show a constable who was on horseback while you were in the middle of this depopulated former metropolis, extremely post-apocalyptic.

This first confinement lasted for eight weeks, and it's an unforgettable experience. The silence and the emptiness and the stillness of this giant anti-city looking at the moment. Looking up and down rivally, where I had seen throngs of celebrants, where I had seen angry protesters, and I had seen marching union members, I now saw nothing and heard no one. The streets of Paris, just as the streets of Paris. There was not a soul to be seen or heard. And I hope to God nothing like this ever happens again. But it probably will. If not any time soon, then at least eventually.

Rome, at its height, had a million people in it. And then by the time in the mid-mid, middle ages, it was down to just a couple of thousand. That's what it felt like. It felt like being in Rome after the fall of the empire. So that's it for me for now. This is the last episode I will record in Paris. I wrote that last little bit sitting on a bench on Pont d'Arcole looking out at the route that I used to walk with my daughter over and over during confinement.

I am recording this on the afternoon of Thursday, April the 15th. Tomorrow I go in for another surgery, then I get a day to recover, then we fly home, and I will see you all on the other side.