squares on the outskirts, they can hold their meeting in plenty of time to get home before the kids need their tea. All that tearing up of cobbles to throw at the police is a thing of the past. If the organizers feel some violence is needed, a few energetic youngsters are fitted out with ski masks and sent at a time mutually agreed upon with the police and press to shout slogans and tear down some barricades.
Occasionally, in my first years in Paris, I watched these displays of violence in the naïve belief that they were legitimate. My lesson came in the 1990s. Out walking with Nicholas, a visitor from Australia, we found ourselves mixed up in the tail end of a manif , which, because it was late and the heat was oppressive, had become a little bad-tempered. On the other side of boulevard Saint-Germain, a kid heaved a café chair through a shop window. Nicholas hurried forward to look, and then simply disappeared. I searched for a while, then went home.
He turned up an hour later.
“It was incredible,” he said. “One minute I’m watching this riot; the next, I’m bundled into the back of a police van and transported with a dozen other baffled Americans and Germans to the far end of the boulevard, well out of harm’s way.”
People are seldom injured in a manif , and spectators almost never, particularly if they are foreigners . Nobody wants to impair the tourist trade. Given the degree of organization and collusion between the demonstrators and the police, there’s more risk of coming to harm watching a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire at the Comédie-Française.
The Serbian film director Dusan Makavajev, a longtime Paris resident, was the first person to alert me to how much a manif was really street theater.
In October 2000, watching on French TV as several hundred thousand fellow Serbs thronged the streets of Belgrade and even drove a bulldozer into parliament, then set the building on fire, he decided he should be there.
“But you know, it is very boring. Nobody is working, so there is no electricity. We sit in the dark, cold apartment all day and watch thousands of people march by in the street, heading into the city.”
Deciding he might as well walk himself, Dusan joined the next march. Almost immediately, he was buttonholed by a friend, accompanied by an Italian TV crew.
“Where’s the man with the Ferrari banner?” he demanded. Apparently someone had torn down the red velvet banner with the rearing horse from the Ferrari showrooms and was leading marches with it.
Dusan hadn’t seen him, but his existence did make him wonder in exactly what cause he himself was marching. He made his way to the head of the manif , where two men held aloft a large cloth sign stretched between two poles. He craned his neck to look.
The banner, grabbed from a supermarket, simply said SAUERKRAUT .
François Mitterrand, the president of France from 1981 to 1995, was a master of the political walk. Traditionally, the newly elected president pays a courtesy visit to the Panthéon, the massive temple with the pillared portico where the great of France lie in state. Advised by his shrewd minister of culture, Jack Lang, Mitterrand left his limo a block away and walked through the cheering mob, carrying the symbol of his party, a single red rose. The image of his lone figure mounting the steps of the Panthéon was worth a million votes.
Throughout the 1980s, every year at Pentecost, Mitterrand made another walk, up the Roche de Solutré, a monolith jutting picturesquely from the vineyards of Macon. Supposedly résistants met and hid out there during the war—symbolism that escaped nobody. The president led the walk, often with his black Lab, Baltique, followed by his family and members of his inner circle (including, of course, Jack Lang), plus selected journalists, who learned to watch the list of invitees for changes in the structure of power. Mitterrand himself seldom said anything. The talking was done by the
Occasionally, in my first years in Paris, I watched these displays of violence in the naïve belief that they were legitimate. My lesson came in the 1990s. Out walking with Nicholas, a visitor from Australia, we found ourselves mixed up in the tail end of a manif , which, because it was late and the heat was oppressive, had become a little bad-tempered. On the other side of boulevard Saint-Germain, a kid heaved a café chair through a shop window. Nicholas hurried forward to look, and then simply disappeared. I searched for a while, then went home.
He turned up an hour later.
“It was incredible,” he said. “One minute I’m watching this riot; the next, I’m bundled into the back of a police van and transported with a dozen other baffled Americans and Germans to the far end of the boulevard, well out of harm’s way.”
People are seldom injured in a manif , and spectators almost never, particularly if they are foreigners . Nobody wants to impair the tourist trade. Given the degree of organization and collusion between the demonstrators and the police, there’s more risk of coming to harm watching a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire at the Comédie-Française.
The Serbian film director Dusan Makavajev, a longtime Paris resident, was the first person to alert me to how much a manif was really street theater.
In October 2000, watching on French TV as several hundred thousand fellow Serbs thronged the streets of Belgrade and even drove a bulldozer into parliament, then set the building on fire, he decided he should be there.
“But you know, it is very boring. Nobody is working, so there is no electricity. We sit in the dark, cold apartment all day and watch thousands of people march by in the street, heading into the city.”
Deciding he might as well walk himself, Dusan joined the next march. Almost immediately, he was buttonholed by a friend, accompanied by an Italian TV crew.
“Where’s the man with the Ferrari banner?” he demanded. Apparently someone had torn down the red velvet banner with the rearing horse from the Ferrari showrooms and was leading marches with it.
Dusan hadn’t seen him, but his existence did make him wonder in exactly what cause he himself was marching. He made his way to the head of the manif , where two men held aloft a large cloth sign stretched between two poles. He craned his neck to look.
The banner, grabbed from a supermarket, simply said SAUERKRAUT .
François Mitterrand, the president of France from 1981 to 1995, was a master of the political walk. Traditionally, the newly elected president pays a courtesy visit to the Panthéon, the massive temple with the pillared portico where the great of France lie in state. Advised by his shrewd minister of culture, Jack Lang, Mitterrand left his limo a block away and walked through the cheering mob, carrying the symbol of his party, a single red rose. The image of his lone figure mounting the steps of the Panthéon was worth a million votes.
Throughout the 1980s, every year at Pentecost, Mitterrand made another walk, up the Roche de Solutré, a monolith jutting picturesquely from the vineyards of Macon. Supposedly résistants met and hid out there during the war—symbolism that escaped nobody. The president led the walk, often with his black Lab, Baltique, followed by his family and members of his inner circle (including, of course, Jack Lang), plus selected journalists, who learned to watch the list of invitees for changes in the structure of power. Mitterrand himself seldom said anything. The talking was done by the
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