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The Avenue of Revolt

LUDIVINE BANTIGNY

Translated by Simon Pare

LUDIVINE BANTIGNY is a professor at the University of Rouen who specialises in the history of social movements and political struggle, in particular the civil unrest in France in May 1968. Among her numerous publications are 1968: De grands soirs en petits matins (Seuil, 2018), La France à l’heure du monde: De 1981 à nos jours (Seuil, 2013) and Révolution (Anamosa, 2019). Her latest book, «La plus belle avenue du monde»: Une histoire sociale et politique des Champs-Élysées (La Découverte, 2020), from which this article is extracted, is a political and social history of the Champs-Élysées.

In November 2018 thousands of people gathered in Paris to demonstrate against the hike in fuel prices and the high cost of living. Wearing hi-vis yellow vests, gilets jaunes, and chanting slogans inspired by the French Revolution and by the civil unrest of May 1968, they descended on the Champs-Élysées, “the world’s most beautiful avenue,” a symbol of the power of the Republic and the inequalities in French society. For months they wreaked havoc. It was the only way to get their voices heard.

“We’ve never seen anything like it.” Stunned police officers say these words over and over again, according to an article in Le Monde on 16 March 2019. There is indeed something stupefying about a popular revolt targeting the Champs-Élysées, that monumental avenue and national symbol. Unexpected, unprecedented, unheard-of: the gilet jaunes, or “yellow vests,” movement is a truly spectacular thing. Even as it unfolds it feels as if nothing will ever be the same again. The combination of originality, suddenness, determination and intensity lends it a historic force. There are all kinds of odd scenes: barricades are set alight; protesters dressed as Marianne, the emblem of the French Republic, face off the police; some demonstrators commandeer a crane, while others drag armchairs out of a restaurant and sit on them in the middle of the road; shop windows are smashed …

The target is the government and its inner sanctum, the presidential palace. A few months earlier, the occupant of the Élysée Palace came out with one of those phrases that at first sounds inconsequential: “Let them come and get me!” The gilets jaunes took him at his word, and now fear is gripping the highest echelons of the state. The Champs is transformed into a battlefield. Footage of these confrontations is, by turns, bizarre and fascinating; “magical” for some, terrifying for others. And word starts to spread that the protests are no longer stage-managed marches; they now have the symbols of power in their sights.

This sends tremors through a place that is both foreign and familiar: a picture-postcard avenue where the people have no rights but have come to claim them. This is the paradox of the Champs-Élysées: it is a highly political place, but it is somewhere that politics traditionally takes a back seat to tourism and shopping. Luxury goods exhibit their inaccessibility. Yet all of a sudden the Champs is repoliticised, showing itself for what it really is. It is in the nature of an uprising to shine a new light on places, to metamorphose them and alter their meaning. Occupying roundabouts transforms soulless places into communal places. Rebellion makes visible those who are invisible and whom the media have forgotten. Seizing the Champs exposes all the violence that underpins the supposed peacefulness of the social order, and for the protagonists it is also a chance to be seen, listened to – and perhaps even heard. That is the strength of a riot in all its violence and joy. A riot in which the excitement of being in this unlikely place is tinged with shock. “We’re here,” the gilets jaunes” chant goes – somewhere no one would ever have expected them to be.

“The area is unrecognisable: a lorry blazes in the middle of the road, a bank is in flames, swirling smoke gives the street scenes an apocalyptic feel, and the whole area is cordoned off.”

“TIME FOR OUTRAGE!”

Act 1. On 17 November 2018 tens of thousands of gilets jaunes take over roundabouts, block toll booths and occupy roads and motorways. Others decide to go to the Champs-Élysées to protest. By noon a thousand people are converging on Place de l’Étoile, the intersection that has the Arc de Triomphe at its centre. The plan at first is to block the traffic by marching over the pedestrian crossings. Soon, however, the crowd invades the avenue. Waving French flags and singing the “Marseillaise” at the tops of their voices, the protesters encourage the riot police to join them. But the police respond with grenades, and so it becomes a matter of evading them, dodging them, giving them the slip. Very quickly the protest morphs into a different kind of demonstration. It is made up of people of all ages. Their slogans and yellow vests talk of taxes, buying power and a state they don’t respect and that doesn’t respect them. “Macron démission” (“Macron resign”) is the phrase binding the movement together. “Wake up, it’s time for outrage!” one placard reads. Barricades are erected to the thrumming of motorbike engines. The scenic avenue has become a field of battle.

A week passes, and the gilets jaunes are back on the Champs. The Twitter account of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, seems oblivious to the situation, suggesting that people “come and admire the fantastic Christmas lights on the Champs-Élysées.” Botched communications, her adviser Matthieu Lamarre quickly acknowledges. Everything is subverted and put to a different use, including a line from the Joe Dassin song “Les Champs-Élysées,” which goes, “Je m’baladais sur l’avenue, le cœur ouvert à l’inconnu …” (“I was walking down the avenue, my heart open to all things new …”) which is reworked as “J’manifestais sur l’avenue, mais mon gilet leur a pas plu …” (“I was protesting on the avenue, but my vest caused a real to-do …”). The protesters get very close to the Élysée Palace, to within a hundred metres or so. The area is unrecognisable: a lorry blazes in the middle of the road, a bank is in flames, swirling smoke gives the street scenes an apocalyptic feel, and the whole area is cordoned off. These pictures are broadcast around the world. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica talks of guerrilla warfare. The next day a journalist from the BFM TV news channel reports live that the gilets jaunes have ripped up the cobblestones from a hundred-metre stretch of the avenue. Fact-checking confirms that this particular section was already under repair and the protesters are not to blame for the missing cobblestones. This misrepresentation feeds the drama. Three days later, after a meeting with the ecological transition minister François de Rugy, Éric Drouet and Priscillia Ludosky (an entrepreneur who in May 2018 launched the petition “For a reduction in retail fuel prices” and which now has well over a million signatures), whom the French media identified as the spokespeople of the gilets jaunes, call for a second demonstration on the Champs for the following Saturday. And every Saturday after that.

THE PARIS MASSACRE

One of the darkest episodes in the history of political demonstrations in Paris took place on 17 October 1961. That day a crowd of thirty thousand Algerians, who had been rallied by the Algerian-nationalist National Liberation Front (FLN), demonstrated against the racist curfew decreed by the prefect of police for Paris, Maurice Papon, which prohibited Muslims from circulating after 8.30 p.m. France was in the final throes of the bloody Algerian War, which lasted from 1954 to 1962 and was marked by guerrilla operations on both sides: between the end of August and the beginning of October 1961 alone the FLN had killed eleven policemen in Paris. Tension was in the air, and the demonstration turned into a bloodbath: according to some historians, on Papon’s orders the police killed as many as three hundred people, although when President Hollande issued a long-overdue official apology half a century later, the figure admitted to was forty. They were not only beaten to death but also thrown into the Seine, some tied up in sacks while still alive. It was also many years before Papon was convicted – and not for this massacre, which still remains unpunished, but for his role in the deportation of Jews during the Vichy years. Having gained independence, Algeria also sullied its own reputation with a killing spree that claimed hundreds of victims in Oran in 1962, a settling of scores with the pieds noirs, the French, other Europeans and Jews who at the time formed a community of around a million people in Algeria. By the end of the 1960s only fifty thousand were left, most having returned to their “homeland,” even though for many this so-called return was their first visit, experiencing a similar fate to that of the retornados from the newly independent Portuguese colonies in the 1970s.

Act 3, on 1 December, shows the first signs of a huge movement coming together. It includes railway workers, anti-racist groups, students, young people from the working-class banlieues and people of many different political persuasions. The SUD rail union appeals for people to “jump aboard the protest train,” and the Comité Adama – a collective that campaigns for justice and truth in the case of Adama Traoré, who died on 19 July 2016 in police custody in Persan at the age of twenty-four – emphasise the need for solidarity: “As people from working-class neighbourhoods, we, too, generally do the most precarious jobs for miserable wages.” This appeal makes a link between the banlieues and isolated rural areas: “We, too, sometimes have to drive for hours to get to our workplaces in factories and warehouses as cleaners or security guards. Many of us are unemployed – 40 per cent in some places.” It concludes: “Let’s forge an alliance of equals.” The philosopher and economist Frédéric Lordon also invites citizens to “pour all our anger into the cauldron.”

The police rapidly kettle the protesters around the Arc de Triomphe and keep them there for several hours. The monument is defaced with ironic and vengeful graffiti: “The gilets jaunes will triumph”; there is a slogan borrowed from Chile – “The people united will never be divided”; and – “We’re right to rebel.” A group of protesters batter down the reinforced door with a concrete bench and a metal bollard and stream into the Arc. Someone damages a plaster statue, a copy of a sculpture by François Rude; it loses an eye. However, the protesters are determined to protect the flame of the unknown soldier and keep watch over it. Herein lies the ambiguity of the place and the moment: the gilets jaunes invading the Arc de Triomphe do not reject patriotic values, let alone the Republic. Ali, the first to enter, says later that he was enraged by suggestions that he was a fascist. The main objective, he says, was to plant the French tricolour at the top. The monument is now a strategic location. Barricades are erected where the avenues enter the roundabout, and there are extremely violent clashes. Caught off guard by the speed of events, the riot police make a show of force, launching ten thousand grenades and bringing in water cannon and even a helicopter, which hovers over the scene. “We were reluctant to call it in because it makes it look as if the city’s under siege,” a high-ranking officer remarks.

“The targets,” the Paris police chief Michel Delpuech recognises, “are property, smart cars, banks, upmarket areas of town. To the gilets jaunes Paris symbolises two things: power and wealth.” Some luxury cars do indeed end up as burned-out shells. The determined protesters force a company of riot police to retreat. A senior civil servant admits that this is now an insurrection.

On 8 December the Place de l’Étoile is again surrounded by gendarmes and armoured cars, which, since the war, have only been seen here during parades. Paris police headquarters instructs shops to lock their doors and shutter their windows. Jean-Noël Reinhardt, the president of the Comité des Champs-Élysées, calls the situation a disaster. Half of the avenue’s shops don’t open that day. There is no let-up in the protests.

On 15 December there is an impressive stand-off between five women dressed as Marianne, the personification of the Republic, and the riot police stationed on the Champs-Élysées. The women stand there, their bodies a political statement. Not far away protesters kneel on the cobblestones, symbolically recalling an incident in Mantes-la-Jolie, a working-class town fifty kilometres west of Paris, where three days earlier police forced dozens of teenagers, most of them Arab or black, to kneel with their hands on their heads like hostages. “Finally, a well-behaved class,” was one policeman’s comment that was widely reported after the event. This powerful act establishes a bond between two places – the Champs-Élysées and Mantes-la-Jolie – that could not be more different, nullifying the social distance between them in a surge of solidarity, as if this luxurious avenue, the most privileged place imaginable, has become an avenue of the people.

A week later a procession is hit by a hail of grenades. A group of protesters retaliate by attacking some police officers on motorbikes who quickly withdraw, but a member of the rearguard draws his gun and points it at the crowd. Fortunately a tragedy is avoided. On 29 December a protester in a Phrygian cap and a gold cape holds aloft the sword and scales of justice. “Insurrection is the people’s duty,” this allegorical woman shouts at the assembled police officers, echoing the words of the 1793 version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” The present permeates the past and brings it alive on an avenue so often swept by the winds of history. The gilets jaunes are obsessed with revolutionary references, and so invading the Champs-Élysées equates to a second storming of the Bastille. Once again the aim is to capture the seat of power, its summit, a place where wealth and all the powers of social domination are concentrated, a symbol and a metaphor for yawning inequalities.

The violence alters the balance of power, but opinion among the gilets jaunes is divided. For some, the casseurs – extremist vandals – are repellent, while others regard violence as a necessary phase, as it has been in every other rebellion in history. The fact that the state is starting to back down goes to prove this, they say.

“Violence doesn’t discredit the movement. It’s necessary to shake things up,” says Laurent, an unemployed man in his fifties who has been protesting on the Champs-Élysées since the start of the uprising.

“The clashes do damage our image, but we won’t get anywhere by doing nothing,” reckons Anthony, a thirty-something who has come all the way from the Gard department in southern France. “We’re pacifists, but if we can’t make our voices heard something has to give. Things can’t go on like this.”

“It isn’t easy to make yourself heard,” says Françoise, a retired postwoman. “We don’t intend to be violent, but they force us to be.” She earns only €780 ($930) per month and has come to protest about rising living costs.

A litter bin smoulders during a gilets jaunes demonstration.

“Aggressive police operations often drive people to violence. One learns by doing, and this goes for violence, too – by facing it, resorting to it, reacting to it.”

Refrigeration specialist Gilles has travelled here from Caen in Normandy. He’s here “in solidarity” and says, “I’m not asking for anything for myself. I don’t mind paying taxes, I just want them to be put to good use.” He remembers May 1968, and the current protests remind him of those events. “It’s good that the youngsters are rebelling.”

Many people who went out on to the streets in 1968 had no intention of doing battle either but still ended up picking up cobblestones and hurling them. Aggressive police operations often drive people to this. One learns by doing, and this goes for violence, too – by facing it, resorting to it, reacting to it. This is how events are shaped: their protagonists act in a way they wouldn’t have imagined two weeks, two days or even two hours beforehand.

It’s no surprise that when calls for an Insurrectionist New Year’s Eve are put out, anxious commentators are alarmed. Several thousand gilets jaunes are out on the Champs-Élysées on 31 December to ring in the new year with some satirical carols. (One example: “Little Emmanuel [Macron]/And all your loyal cabinet/You better run like hell/And leave us to celebrate.”) But this isn’t a truce, and the gilets jaunes handing out flowers to the police does nothing to dial down the tension.

On 8 January 2019 the philosopher Luc Ferry, a former minister in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, urges police officers to use their guns – and not just police officers. “We have the fourth largest army in the world,” he says. “It can put a stop to this bullshit.”

“They should call in the army and start shooting,” a shopkeeper says during an interview with the LCI television channel, echoing Ferry’s comments.

Involve the army in the crackdown? The government is seriously considering it. Its spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, entertains the possibility, but the heads of the armed forces don’t share this position, and so the government is forced to backtrack.

HOLLOW LAUGHTER, OUTRIGHT FEAR

This suggestion of military intervention comes after Act 18 of the movement on 16 March 2019. Several shops on the Champs-Élysées are looted that day. Incendiary devices cause a number of blazes. A news-stand at number ninety-nine is gutted by flames. A bank burns briefly, and firefighters have to rescue a woman and her child from the second floor of the building.

And then Fouquet’s is sacked. The front of the famous restaurant goes up in flames. However, the blaze doesn’t appear to have been caused by protesters but by police tear-gas canisters landing on its awning. In any case, this incident has a startling impact, and commentators rush to express their outrage. Emmanuel Macron’s assessment is that it is an assault on the Republic itself. In an editorial in the extreme-right-wing weekly Valeurs actuelles, on 12 April 2019, the journalist Jean-Marc Albert declares himself offended that “the casseurs took full responsibility for their act. They thought it completely normal to set fire to an iconic place where the elite dines. This is to disregard the tumultuous history of restaurants, which were originally places where those in power were challenged,” his argument being that Voltaire and Rousseau used to meet at Le Procope, an 18th-century hub of subversive activity. According to Jean-Michel Aphatie, a radio and TV pundit, to suggest that the brasserie is a “symbol of the oligarchy” is similar to a Taliban discourse, and he tweets that the gilets jaunes movement is “both horrible and shocking.” Political journalist Christophe Barbier goes even further on BFM TV, declaring that it is not only Fouquet’s that has been targeted but “the entire system of capitalism, commerce and representative democracy; in a nutshell, everything the West stands for is being attacked by nihilists.”

One new development is that those on the side of the gilets jaunes approve the ransacking of the restaurant – or at least many refuse to “condemn” it as they are being urged to. Fouquet’s and its (rich) patrons don’t inspire much sympathy. The following comments are proffered to outstretched microphones: “This place represents money, and we don’t have any money”; “People are so fed up that they won’t even listen”; “It’s a way of grabbing the attention of the elites who look down on us”; “I’m almost glad it happened. I think maybe people will listen to us now”; “No, I don’t condemn it. Tough!” No hint of compassion for the avenue either, this symbol of brazen wealth. Many people emphasise other, less symbolic forms of violence. For them the real violence is social violence. “Fouquet’s is nothing. Just wait until the gilets jaunes destroy maternity clinics, close schools, dismantle the courts, gut the hospitals. Watch the outrage then!” “The government are the real casseurs,” reads a banner unfurled on the Champs-Élysées. The media’s sympathy for Fouquet’s merely serves to highlight its indifference to the plight of the men and women who never make the front pages: all the sacked workers, the hundreds of homeless dying on the streets, the unemployed, the people in precarious jobs, the undocumented migrants, the young people killed by the police …

There is a shift in strategy. Although many commentators draw a sharp distinction between black blocs and gilets jaunes, the latter are no longer so quick to distance themselves.

“Everyone used to be scared of the black blocs, but now people see them as an asset,” explains John, an organiser who has come from Nancy. “They get things done. We’re too peaceful.”

“Up to now I’d step in to stop any vandalism. Now I just think, “Oh well”,” says Jennifer, a forklift-truck operator and mother of two. “I saw them wrecking Fouquet’s, the symbol of the oligarchy, and I can’t say I agree with it, but I no longer disapprove.”

Ana, a postwoman, thinks the same. “It’s great because the bourgeoisie are so safe in their little bubble that to get them to give in they need to feel physically scared, scared for their own safety.”

“We’ve learned that we are heard only when things get broken,” says Johnny, the director of a day-care centre in the Ardennes. “Macron has to accept he’s toast.”

Johnny’s use of a burning metaphor is probably accidental, but people do take a malicious pleasure in coming up with jokes about the burned-out Fouquet’s: “It’s usually the bill that burns your fingers”; “A nice chargrilled steak”; “Do they still serve crème brûlée?” Thirsting for revenge, “a horde of rich Parisians is on their way to destroy a Burger King in Pantin.”

A car vandalised during a gilets jaunes demonstration; a mannequin in the window of a luxury boutique in Paris.

Police in riot gear on the Champs-Élysées.

“On 11 October the environmental group Extinction Rebellion occupies the avenue, proclaiming that “the only way to enter a better world is to break in”.”

Even the conservative daily Le Figaro notes the irony on 18 March: Fouquet’s calls to mind Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances, who was punished for flaunting his wealth. His motto was Quo non ascendet? (What heights will he not scale?), which the paper reworks as: “Quo non descendet? one wonders this morning at the sight of the devastated Fouquet’s.”

A few days later a wall of sheet metal goes up around the restaurant. In his column in the left-wing Libération on 29 March, author Sylvain Prudhomme mocks its opulence: “Oh, the consummate design, the top-notch machining. Such an exquisitely refined carapace, right down to the finish. Fouquet’s is absolutely incorrigible – even their armour-plating is more bling-bling than anyone else’s. This time, I’m afraid, they’ve given the world something perhaps only they were capable of: the very first platinum palisade.” Some people think it’ll be a magnet for metal lovers … What’s undeniable is that the restaurant is “armoured.”

Meanwhile, criminal proceedings commence. An auxiliary nurse named Ambre and a train driver called Franck find themselves first in custody and then in court for taking four forks and a stool, being accused of theft and receiving stolen goods. Both deny stealing anything. A video presented by their lawyer, Arié Alimi, clearly shows one of the restaurant’s security guards picking up a jar of cutlery and some items from the floor and handing them out to people nearby. Eventually the magistrate’s court dismisses the case on a technicality without further deliberation.

Some commentators do spare a thought for the staff at Fouquet’s. The restaurant’s management reassures everyone that everything possible will be done to ensure that “colleagues” don’t lose out. Staff will continue to receive their wages. Incidentally, in the hotel above the restaurant it’s business as usual. What does prompt some bemusement, however, is that these same commentators have seldom shown much interest in the fate of workers whose factory has closed down. On 13 July the refurbished brasserie once more opens its doors. The front of the restaurant has been entirely redone, although the awning is now made of cotton rather than acrylic – because apparently cotton doesn’t burn so easily. There is another announcement that same day: the Barrière group – which owns Fouquet’s as well as a reported thirty-six casinos, eighteen hotels and more than 120 restaurants with a total estimated turnover of $1.42 billion – plans to open a Fouquet’s in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The police presence grows ever more threatening, but still the gilets jaunes return to the Champs, overcoming their fear and ready to break taboos. On 14 July, despite the security forces keeping the protesters at bay, Emmanuel Macron is whistled and booed during the Bastille Day parade. Anyone carrying a yellow balloon, not to mention wearing a yellow vest, is booked. The unlikeliest offences are punished as a hail of fines and charges rains down on the sunny Champs. When evening comes new barricades go up, and some are ablaze by nightfall. With each new act the question is: what’s going to happen on the Champs-Élysées? There is a blanket ban on demonstrations, but the gilets jaunes keep on coming. On 21 September, during Act 45, they retake the Champs despite seven thousand police officers being deployed. Tourists find themselves caught up in the clouds of tear gas, too, and the pictures are replayed endlessly across the world.

A few weeks later, on 11 October, the environmental group Extinction Rebellion occupies the avenue, proclaiming that “the only way to enter a better world is to break in.” Skill, agility and speed: the Arc de Triomphe is more heavily guarded than ever, but XR activists manage to drape their organisation’s banner from the monument. The visual impact is clear and deliberate: the idea is to “create an image” by analysing, manipulating and subverting the society of the spectacle. “End of the world, end of the month, same culprits, same struggles” – once more the slogan rings out, but this time it’s for a common cause.

WHAT DO THE PEOPLE WANT?

So what are these struggles about? First and foremost, they are against the high cost of living. In the current situation fuel prices have become a major issue. The “carbon tax,” a national tax hike on the consumption of energy commodities, certainly lit the touch paper, but popular revolts are not a reflex reaction to economic hardship – they are not merely “rebellions of the belly” – they vent an experience of contempt, a sense of injustice and their corollary, an aspiration to be acknowledged, respected and treated with dignity. The uprising of the gilets jaunes is just the latest example. It calls into question the very foundations of democracy and the distribution of wealth, and that it does so Saturday after Saturday on an avenue of such splendour and luxury – and power – lends it even greater force and meaning.

THE “BLING-BLING” BRASSERIE

Founded in 1899 by the drinks manufacturer Louis Fouquet (with a silent “t”), Fouquet’s (with the “t’s” pronounced in the English way) immediately became an institution on the Champs-Élysées. Early in its history it became a meeting place for aviators – the most glamorous heroes in the early 20th century – after Brazilian pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont, in 1903, “parked” his airship at his house at number 114 and went to celebrate the feat over the road at Fouquet’s. During the 1930s the clientele was dominated by people working in the film industry – it was where negotiations were conducted and contracts signed – and over the following decades it played host to a succession of the most famous names from the silver screen, from the nouvelle vague to Gérard Depardieu. In 1990, to save the institution from collapse, a committee of VIPs successfully had the brasserie registered as a historic monument. It was acquired in 1998 by the Barrière group, which operates casinos and hotels, and, almost inevitably, because of its history and its location, the restaurant became a symbol of the capital’s elite. In 2007 the newly elected Nicolas Sarkozy chose to celebrate his presidential win at Fouquet’s with a sumptuous dinner attended by a hundred top politicians, business leaders and celebrities. The party went down in the country’s political history and set the tone for the presidency of the man subsequently nicknamed the “bling-bling” president through his love of the good life and his circle of powerful friends. And, like Sarkozy, Fouquet’s has never managed to shake off a reputation for hubris (not that it has tried very hard) that made it a target for the rage of the gilets jaunes.

A demonstrator in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

It is an intergenerational movement that includes as many young people as pensioners. According to a study published in 2019 in the prestigious Revue française de science publique, many of the latter “have been through hard times, either personally or through having to provide regular financial assistance to their grown-up children.” Women and men are equally represented. The unemployment rate among the gilets jaunes is higher than in the general population, around 16 per cent compared with a national average of 10 per cent, according to a collective sociological survey. The gilets jaunes who took part in the aforementioned study describe their precarious circumstances: 25 per cent say they live in a household with a monthly income of less than €1,200 ($1,400), 50 per cent earn under €2,000 ($2,400) and 75 per cent under €2,900 ($3,450). The gilets jaunes are workers, employees (many of them temps), low-skilled, self-employed people and, to a lesser extent, intermediate professionals across a range of sectors – many public-sector workers and, in the private sector, lots of hauliers as well as auxiliary nurses, cleaners and hospital staff. It is a working-class revolt.

A social scientist and, like many gilets jaunes, a temporary worker in a variety of different sectors, Tristan immediately identifies with the movement and goes to the Champs-Élysées with thousands of others “to protest, or rather to exist, to exist in the eyes of the world.” He doesn’t know much about the Champs. He lived in Burgundy for thirty years and has probably only been here once before, “in a rush” on a school trip. The thoroughfare might be described as “the most beautiful avenue in the world,” but he is “constantly haunted by a feeling that this beauty has been hijacked.” He has lived in Paris for three years now without ever coming here. Why would he? Certainly not for “Fouquet’s, the extravagant window displays, the overpriced drinks, the Arc de Triomphe, which is nothing but a reminder that victory is all about massacring people. Then, out of the blue, real beauty emerged. When all these people, most of them country folk like me, seized the Champs. There was this surge of collective power as we formed a human chain to dismantle some scaffolding and build a huge barricade with it. None of us knew anyone, but we were in it together – not to confront the police at all costs but to assert our dignity. That day, fed up with being regularly humiliated, ignored and ridiculed, we said “Enough”, and we won. We won the right to our dignity.”

Marion, an artist, author and actress, defines herself as a “class defector,” a feminist and a gilet jaune. She describes how it felt to demonstrate in this “smart neighbourhood” alongside working-class men and women like herself. “For the first time in my life, as someone who’s ashamed when I pass well-dressed people in the street, when I have to introduce my parents to my rich friends” parents, when my classmates used to bump into my uncles in the street, when I had to describe the house where my grandparents lived … for the first time I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t ashamed when we passed the line of rich, smartly dressed people in their fur coats queueing for the museum and they looked at us in shock and fear. I was proud. Proud to be marching with these people and to see all these bodies advancing across the cobblestones of the smart avenue … That day we were the ones staring at those bourgeois men and women, we were the ones who had the right to be there and march down the middle of the road, and they had to be quiet and scared. Because we were marching to victory.” What came bursting out at that moment, according to Marion, is a “physical event produced by unknown emotions, a sense of history being made, combined with something unique.” A historic event.

“Fed up with being regularly humiliated, ignored and ridiculed, we said ‘Enough,’ and we won. We won the right to our dignity.”

One of the placards held aloft on the Champs-Élysées since the very beginning of the movement reads: “Dear bourgeoisie, can we not all live with dignity, please?” A banner puts the same sentiment in starker terms: “The people are on their knees, death to the bourgeoisie.” Many slogans express bitter anger towards the president: “The cynics and the lazy have come for the contemptuous and the greedy”; “Macron, your disdain and arrogance are an insult to France”; “We’ll help you across the street.” Memories come flooding back, accentuating people’s sense of being looked down upon. Macron’s comment about workers, “many of them illiterate,” things he said about “nothing people,” “the cynics, the lazy, the extremists” and the certainty he voiced that people only had to “cross the street” to find a job. In response, there is an anti-establishment, situationist feel to the avenue: “Sur les pavés, la rage” (“On the cobbles, the rage”) echoes the May 1968 motto “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Under the cobbles, the beach”); “We want to pay ISF too” (ISF is the wealth tax); “Victoire par chaos” (“Victory through chaos,” a pun on “Victoire par KO” or “Victory by a knockout”); “People and finance don’t get on’ … And there is also a furious tag daubed on a luxury store’s smashed window: “We’re deducting the ISF at source.” The slogans take aim at the financial industry, the media and the police as the armed wing of the state: “Media = state propaganda”; “The banks rule us”; “Welcome to Teargasistan.” Many call for revolution, sometimes playing on the name of the ruling party, La République en Marche with “La révolution en marche (“The revolution on the move”); “Elites: optimisation, low taxation, evasion / The people: privations, frustration. Revolution?” One protester, channelling the writer Lautréamont, has smeared “As beautiful as an impure insurrection” along the Champs. There’s nothing pure about this event – that much is undeniable. The rebellion has got out of hand and entered uncharted territory.

These statements by the gilets jaunes highlight social deprivation, expressing concerns that are all too frequently reduced to statistics in concrete and tangible terms. “We are all politicians,” reads one of the vests. Politics isn’t the preserve of those who govern; it is a public good, res publica, a thing shared. This uprising is all about exposing other forms of violence than the smashed shop windows. The violence of social contempt and the gulf between the poor and the rich. The violence of the pressure to take any job, crushing any notion of solidarity and sometimes even a person’s dignity. The violence of misery at work and on benefits. The brutal culture of competitiveness and management by obedience.

A demonstrator draped in the French tricolour walks past an advertisement for Lacoste.

Police in riot gear face demonstrators in Paris.

From this moment on the revolt looks beyond simply exercising its power of refusal. All over the country people write lists of demands – sometimes called cahiers de doléances after the lists of grievances drawn up in pre-revolutionary France and presented to the Estates General. They call for increases to the minimum wage, basic welfare payments and pensions. They demand a massive public-sector hiring campaign for schools, post offices, hospitals and transport, a vast home-building scheme and penalties for mayors and officials who tolerate people sleeping rough. They catalogue the gigantic sums swallowed up by tax evasion and “gifts” to investors. They want to abolish the current tax structure by proposing the cancellation of tax rises and the reinstatement of the wealth tax, while also protesting against socially regressive indirect taxes. They challenge many lethal aberrations that are damaging to the environment, from the huge amounts of plastic waste from useless gadgets to planned obsolescence. What is emerging is clearly a blueprint for a fairer, more supportive society.

“Minister, are you planning to destroy the Champs-Élysées?” begins the letter addressed by the member of parliament for the France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party, François Ruffin, to the minister for culture, Franck Riester. There is a certain irony here: the letter is dated 1 April 2019. The MP’s goal is to help save a grassroots work of art. With the help of a few friends a worker in Villeneuve-sur-Lot has built a six-metre lookalike of the Arc de Triomphe from recycled wood. The structure is a memorial to Olivier Daurelle who was crushed to death by a lorry in December 2018 while occupying a roundabout. The gilets jaunes of Villeneuve explain that “We’re up against someone who doesn’t answer us, doesn’t listen to us. So we said to ourselves that we’d put this nice piece of artwork here. It’ll make us visible. There have been times this winter at the roundabout when we’ve doubted. Tough times, difficult times. This helped to keep us going. We lost Olivier. He was one of our leaders, a great guy, a democrat, a pacifist. He was our monument. Everyone listened to him. He was knocked down by a lorry forcing its way through. The driver was in the wrong, but no one’s ever really talked about that …”

The gilets jaunes see the arch as a symbol of peaceful protest and a piece of vernacular art, but the prefect of the department has ordered that it be destroyed. At the same time, in Cannet-des-Maures in the Var, a department of Provence, some gilets jaunes built another Arc de Triomphe, this one out of around a hundred pallets, a job that took two hundred hours. This monument, too, is demolished – by the company that owns the roundabout, Vinci.

One branch of Fouquet’s is planned in Abu Dhabi, but other more modest ones have already opened at Angles in the Gard department in the south, at Valenciennes in the north, both small huts the gilets jaunes have named after the famous brasserie. Some of the replicas of the Champs-Élysées are deadly serious, others are ironic. They mark their distance from the avenue while also appropriating it. Throughout the revolt, some journalists have held up the Arc de Triomphe and Fouquet’s incidents as emblematic of a damaged republic. Those same journalists, incidentally, seem not to show any sympathy for the people who have been – literally – blinded during the crackdown. How is it possible to be more outraged by damage to a plaster statue than that to the faces of real women and men, some of them very young, leaving them mutilated for ever? This question will remain unanswered.

IN THE RED AND IN THE ROUND

It is Christmas Eve. The daily papers inform us that in Laval, in western France, the lights “are in no way inferior to the Champs-Élysées.” I smile, and I’m pleased, although I have my doubts. That evening the avenue is ablaze with light – and that isn’t a metaphor. It looks like a forest of scarlet trees: the illuminations are in flames. The Champs want us to see a vie en rouge. Colours really have lost their political affiliations. In a cock-up tinged with irony, one of the French Air Force acrobatic team, the Patrouille de France, spat out a trail of red instead of blue during the Bastille Day military parade. And red has been the colour of the Champs since the demonstrations began – the red of shame. Even Fouquet’s Yule log is covered in “bright-red marzipan” this year to mirror the colour of the brasserie’s awning. No effort is spared to make Paris worthy of its sobriquet the City of Lights once again. By a quirk of history, the association that organises the Christmas lights on the Champs-Élysées was founded on 11 May 1968. Four days earlier the student movement had taken control of the Champs-Élysées to announce with bravado their radical critique, and two days later the general strike began. Rebellion is revealing. It also lifts a corner of the veil obscuring social divisions. Amid all the sparkling splendour it is impossible not to think of everything that remains in the shadows. “Cover that world that I cannot bear to see,” a modern Molière might remark about society’s hypocrisy.

LES VIES NOIRES COMPTENT

On 19 July 2016, his twenty-fourth birthday, Adama Traoré, a French citizen of Malian descent, died in the Persan barracks in the Val d’Oise after fleeing from an earlier arrest. The gendarmes had stopped him on the street, and Adama, recently released from prison and without an identity card, had run off. The causes of his death are disputed: according to the police, he died of a cardiogenic oedema linked to pre-existing health conditions and the physical stress experienced during his escape; according to his family, the cardiogenic oedema was caused by “positional asphyxiation caused by prone restraint” – in other words, the arrest technique used by the gendarmes. Since then Adama’s older sister, Assa Traoré, has been fighting for truth and justice. In a survey published in the summer of 2020 by the Seine-Saint-Denis authorities, over 80 per cent of those interviewed said they thought ethnicity or skin colour gave rise to discrimination in dealings with the police or at work. Young people aged eighteen to twenty-five perceived to be black or Arab are twenty times more likely to be stopped by the police than their white peers. In the wake of the protests that broke out in the USA following George Floyd’s death in 2020, the Comité Adama’s struggle gained resonance at a national level and beyond. Tens of thousands of people came out on the streets to protest about police violence, with banners repeating the slogans seen in the USA: “BLM – Black Lives Matter” and “Je n’arrive plus a respirer” (“I can’t breathe”), the last words of both Adama and George Floyd.

“Walter Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project that the “mighty seek to secure their position with blood (police), with cunning (fashion), with magic (pomp)”. The Champs-Élysées is a concentrate of these three ingredients.”

Yet for around a decade now “roundabout revolutions” (as the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman dubbed them in his 2015 book of the same name) have shaken societies whose wheels are usually so well oiled. They have come to demonstrate that the world is not running as smoothly as it might seem. Roundabouts, these banal and practical traffic-management measures, become strategic sites when occupied. Weizman writes that it is like tactical acupuncture: all the roads entering and leaving them are blocked. It just so happens that Place de l’Étoile was the world’s first roundabout, along with Columbus Circle in New York City. Its designer, Eugène Hénard, an architect for Paris city council, called it a “turning crossroads” in 1907. The irony of the matter is that a system intended to increase traffic flow has become a place where “politics is relocated,” according to the sociologist Laurent Jeanpierre. Essentially, this echoes the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s analysis of what is political: it is not the “move along, nothing to see here” of the police managing a crowd but conflict and the demand for equality.

Beneath the Place de l’Étoile is a vast unoccupied space that Paris city council now plans to put to good use, perhaps as a huge wine cellar or a luxury shopping centre. In a part of town where every square metre of land is worth a fortune, it seems unthinkable not to wring some money from the basement. It would be impossible just to leave it as it is – the market abhors a vacuum. The only certainty is that it will be converted into something prestigious.

Walter Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project that the “mighty seek to secure their position with blood (police), with cunning (fashion), with magic (pomp).” The Champs-Élysées is a concentrate of these three ingredients. No wonder it was targeted. No wonder a popular uprising tried to occupy it. Those who sought to unmask the cunning and defy the “magic” by showing that the reality was very different sometimes paid the price – the price in blood in the case of those blinded and mutilated. To convey the distress of the struggle to make ends meet, the helplessness of being trapped in a precarious job and poverty’s brutal embrace in this nexus of power was a challenge, a unique opportunity, an echo chamber for this struggle for equality. It casts these Elysian Fields in a very different light: behind the façade – a negative of the Champs.

This article is extracted from «La plus belle avenue du monde»: Une histoire sociale et politique des Champs-Élysées by Ludivine Bantigny (La Découverte, 2020).

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