French report EP. 2

Sciences Po Lille has not been blockaded for a single day this week, which means we are catching up on everything missed during the blocus. Well, some of us (me) managed to deliver three presentations in the span of two hours while gritting our teeth, because Nathalie Arthaud was sitting in the next room and we couldn't go and watch her speech. The chaos with classes, tests, and deadlines has spilled over into the following week as well, and in many modules, the assessment requirements are being changed just so everything can actually be completed in time. Lecturers are swamped with emails, and we students are receiving warnings in our home university inboxes stating that under no circumstances should we get caught up in any clashes, and that in case of trouble we should contact our coordinators directly. We have no choice, therefore, but to wait and send our representatives to the Assemblée générale to defend our interests (even though those differ greatly among international students).

And since young people love social media, Instagram and X are full of bitter jokes about the police, the government, and the far right. For instance, there is a narrative circulating that France has literally become a Fortnite lobby—a space filled with a mix of completely randomly dressed and, above all, randomly behaving characters. Whether it is footage from the Halloween edition of the protests, where you can spot Deadpool, Spider-Man, the Daltons, little pigs, and the like in the crowd, or videos filmed at any given mobilisation, it is really clear that the French have embraced these demonstrations with l’ambiance festive. Another example is the announcement by former five-time Olympic judo champion Teddy Riner that he is running for president. Speaking to the media about his political stance, he stated that he is “neither on the right nor on the left—he just wants the chaos to end” (how original!).

Even serious politics as presented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the most prominent figure of the far-left La France Insoumise(literally: Unbowed / Unyielding France), comes across as no more realistic. Last week, he published his political programme and presented its contents in Bourget, an industrial town. This programme comes in the form of a book titled L’avenir en commun, and his most resonant campaign slogan is Tout va changer—meaning everything is going to change.Having only skimmed through it (after all, there is uni work to catch up on), I am personally very sceptical, and it seems to me that Mélenchon has decided the ideal strategy is simply to “waffle” and promise a complete overhaul of the system.The individual points are good—they address the issues that genuinely trouble the French the most—but the extent to which he wants to change or introduce these things, given that his mandate would last five years rather than twenty, is somewhat absurd. Moreover, this is already his fourth consecutive presidential bid, having lost all the previous ones. He certainly stays true to his party’s name: unbowed. Unfortunately, however, Marine Le Pen’s ratings remain higher than his in most polls.

Le Pen and others approve of the way the police have been maintaining order, which clashes with the views of several experts. Many organisations have pointed out that France is starting to lose points on rule-of-law metrics. This stems from the fact that police violence against protesters is not only persisting, but actually escalating—in some cities, they attempted to deploy a sonic weapon, and in larger cities, water cannon are now a permanent fixture of their arsenal. At the same time, Lecornu and Macron have stated that it would be ideal if social media could be blocked before and during major protests in order to hamper protesters’ coordination. The French Interior Minister has even contacted telecommunications providers to see what options they have in this regard. Those who came to protest peacefully,however, would be out of luck as well.

It is not only the streets that are packed during protests, though, but also the galleries on a public holiday. A month ago, an exhibition of anarchist art opened at La Piscine. Among other works, you could find Impressionist-style paintings,magazine cuttings, and pencil drawings. Part of the exhibition was also dedicated to František Kupka, whose paintings and drawings stood out next to Rocheval’s. One painting in particular struck us; until that point, you felt a certain detachment from what was unfolding in the artworks. It was La Charge (by André Devambez), and at first you couldn't tell whether it depicted the recent days of protest in Paris or the year 1902 (hint: it was from 1902). Many protesters are experiencing the exact same police violence today, more than 120 years later.