Serendiparis

Some days in Paris on our way somewhere, we end up someplace else even more interesting. In fact, it happens a lot, and we've come to think of Paris as akin to the magical land of Serendip. 

Case in point, last Saturday. When we left the apartment bright and early and took the #12 Mètro over to the vicinity of the big convention center (Parc des Expositions) on the south border of Paris, we thought we were just going to do research for a post we intend to run in a few weeks on ghastly development threats to Paris.

But our visit to the fifteenth arrondissement dropped us unexpectedly into Protest Ground Zero, the opening day of the Paris Auto Show, and allowed us a look at Paris police practices and how they differ from what we've experienced in the States.

In the three hours we spent there before other appointments we hung out with hundreds of auto workers frightened at the impending loss of as many as eighteen thousand industrial jobs in an already battered French economy, and watched Greenpeace literally hang out in a cat-and-mouse game with the police.

First, Greenpeace: Members of the organization had come to protest against Volkswagen, which was unveiling the latest edition of its Golf, a diesel model which is even lower in exhaust emissions than the much-loved Toyota Prius.  

Volkswagen's slogan: Das Car. Greenpeace's slogan: Das Problem.

Why das problem? Because Greenpeace felt it was hypocritical of Volkswagen to release low emission vehicles without full support for low emission standards in Germany. At the same time as it is releasing the Golf, Greenpeace complained, Volkswagen "is at the heart of a group of companies lobbying against new laws which we need to cut CO2 emissions, reduce our oil use, and protect places like the Arctic from climate change." 

So Greenpeace picked the Paris Auto Show to make their point in typical, high-profile Greenpeace fashion. They had a cadre of leafleters on the sidewalk, in matching T-shirts with no other identifying labels, so the message was clear and uncluttered.

Then, five stories up on two of the four ziggurat/California Mission-style towers that mark the convention center entrance, two teams of two mountaineers each had ascended to unfurl anti-Volkswagen banners. One banner used the Volkswagen logo as the "o" in C02, and had the slogan "Das Problem." The second banner, in black type on a yellow field, read "Volkswagen Nous Enfume," which translates as "Volkswagen pollutes us," or "Volkswagen we smoke," or "Volkswagen hides its intentions behind a curtain of smoke." Any of these work, French is slippery that way.

One of the unfortunate trends we witnessed in the decade before we moved here was the post-9/11 federalization and militarization of American police forces, and the simultaneous rapid erosion (as reporter Chris Hedges documents) of civil rights and freedom of speech, all in the name of "fighting terrorism," a policy no politician can appear to be against, no matter how broadly the term is stretched. This dismaying non-partisan trend began with the Patriot Act under Bush Two, and has accelerated during the Obama administration.

Local police departments feeding at the Homeland Security trough have bulked up since September 2001 with $34 billion worth of weapons like tanks, drones and heavy assault rifles.

Statue commemorating Free Speech Movement, Berkeley Marina, California

Unlike the free-range demonstrations we joined and even organized in the SF Bay Area and elsewhere in the late '60s, police now corral protesters at events like political conventions into cyclone-fenced faux-"Free Speech Zones" blocks from any delegate's sight, surrounded by armor-clad Robocop imitators.

In the USA, we would have expected the Greenpeace protest to "require" a cordon of armed riot police pushing citizens away from the convention center while the rest of the force figured out a way to bring the Greenpeace climbers down.

Not so the Paris police. Citizens were free to come and go as they pleased, five floors below the climbers and banners, and the police presence was minuscule, mostly watching as if cheering for their side. Their side brought out its mountaineers, who climbed up through the inside of the first tower, talked to the Greenpeace folks for about twenty minutes, then sent a cop rappelling down to grab the banner and toss it below to waiting plainclothesmen, who hustled it off.

 

Then the policemen climbed down and headed for the second tower, leaving the Greenpeace mountaineers hanging by their ropes. Elegant, Apollonian French restraint--no arrests, nothing daring or stupid attempted. We presume that the Greenpeace climbers were arrested later when they came down (three climbers were arrested later indoors after they unfurled two "Nous Enfume" banners from the ceiling during the Volkswagen keynote address), but there was no urgent need to pluck them from their perch.

Interlude: Before we get to tower two, enter the autoworkers. These are tough, tough times in France. Official unemployment has risen to 10.2%, and the psychological barrier of three million unemployed was just crossed. Newly elected President François Hollande had no honeymoon, as reporter Eric Pape describes; his approval rating has dropped into the low forties after barely 100 days in office. Much like President Barack Obama, Hollande is dealing with an inherited mess, but the voters are scared and angry, and the blame is on the incumbent.

The French company Peugeot is close to bankruptcy, and another major employer, Ford, keeps announcing more and more job cuts despite threats from the socialist government to levy heavy financial penalties for doing so.

So the autoworkers unions bused in hundreds of demonstrators who rallied outside the building (and later inside), under the watchful eye of perhaps ten bored-looking motorcycle cops. More free speech, no hassles, thank you. The autoworkers even set off red distress flares, and nobody panicked.

Meanwhile, back at Greenpeace tower two, two other mountaineers (one a woman, in case you're keeping score) unfurled a "Nous Enfume" banner. Then, to bring home the point, she lit a smoke bomb that polluted for at least two minutes. Perhaps it was organic smoke.

It was time to leave to make our other appointments, so we didn't see if the same three mountaineering cops made a similar ascent for that banner, but it looked like one was underway.

Then, serendipitously, just as we were leaving, two celebrities showed up directly under the smoking tower. They were unknown to us, but apparently well-known to a score of mostly teenaged autograph seekers who politely mobbed them in an elegant, understated French way.

 

So, a Paris Play pop quiz. Can any of our French readers (or any other nationality) tell us who these two heartthrobs are? We think he might be a sports star, and she, model or actress or nuclear physicist, or all three. First reader to get it right and post their names in the comments section below wins a Lebanese lunch, on us, at one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts, Comptoir Méditerranée. Serendipity for somebody: start out reading a post, end up with a free lunch.

Is This Germany in the Thirties?

Faux Mexican wrestling poster; street art mocking the French presidential runoff

As we wait for Sunday's second round of voting in the French presidential election, when the center-right incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Socialist challenger, François Hollande, face off, mano-a-mano, the big story is still the fact that Marine Le Pen, the 43-year-old, far-right, anti-immigration challenger, picked up almost eighteen percent of the first-round vote April 22. This was a tad more than her father, Jean-Marie, received in the first and second rounds, respectively, as the National Front's presidential candidate in 2002.

Will she, or will she not endorse either remaining candidate by Sunday? some commentators still breathlessly ask.

No, she won't. She dislikes both parties, and positioned herself in a triumphal speech on election night (“We have exploded the monopoly of the two parties...”) as the successor to the failed policies of Sarkozy's UMP party, and the perceived "ultra-liberalism" of Hollande and the left in general. Imagine, for example, if U.S. Republican Sarah Palin had been a third-party candidate, and, having lost in the hypothetical first round, had taken a whack at both McCain and Obama. (Just for fun, further imagine the U.S. with viable third parties, instead of parties that are two sides of a coin residing in a lobbyist's pocket.)

While Ms. Le Pen may not be a kingmaker, there will also be the question of legislative representation in France's multi-party Assembly and Senate further down the line, and perhaps even pressure on Sarkozy (if re-elected) to consider National Front politicians as cabinet members. That's not bloody likely either, according to most pundits, but there are some talking heads who say, "Hey, why not give her a shot? She's got no program other than anti-immigration, trade protectionism, anti-NATO, and ultra-nationalism; give her party some responsibility in a cabinet and watch them tank." Ms. Le Pen has served as a member of the European Parliament, representing north-west France.

 

Meanwhile, the 'tween elections period was marked by a bit of political theater here in town yesterday (May Day), a ritual that Le Pen's National Front party performs every year, but since this was an election year, their event--a parade and wreath-laying--was bigger and better, and quite well-organized. While the trains didn't run on time (the parade was late), there were dozens of contingents of National Front supporters bussed in from all over France, and the number of blue, white and red national flags made it look like a Nixon rally (had Dick been French).

The ritual political theater, started by Ms. Le Pen's father, who founded the Catholic-based party in 1972, involves placing a floral wreath at a truly gaudy gold-painted statue of Jeanne D'Arc, the national heroine of France, across from the Louvre on Paris' Right Bank.

We at Paris Play found this odd, since we know May Day as an international left-wing celebration, and since May first is known here as Fete du Travail (Labor Day, which is akin to the holiday in the U.S. in September), to honor the labor movement and its successes. Labor is a powerful force here in France, and the 35-hour week and an early retirement age are practically sacrosanct. In late 2010, during his first term, Sarkozy successfully pushed the legislature to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, but a Socialist president with a heavy political debt to labor may work to drop it back down.

Anyway, this is the 600th anniversary year of Jeanne D'Arc's birth, and the fortuitous coincidence of it being an election year in which the National Front did well, made the party's ritual tweaking of left-wing noses even more of an event this year. Marine Le Pen AND Jean-Marie showed up for the wreath-laying, and Paris Play estimates that ten thousand National Front members attended the event, and the party rally in front of the Garnier Opera House.

(Our crowd estimate: We counted 300 people passing a single point during one minute, and the crowd kept passing for one half-hour. Later on Tuesday, we attended the annual left-wing, Left Bank May Day celebration, which coincidentally happened to meander by our block. As we write this post, the crowd is still passing, after some hours. Hundreds of thousands. However, none of the photographs in this post are from that parade. We found the right more fascinating.)

Are we in Germany in the 1930s, as some would have it, and are these the faces of fascism? Or is this just a bunch of scared and angry (and happy to have made a political tremor) French nationalists enjoying the first really sunny Paris day we've had in weeks, since the false spring of late March? We hate stories that end "only time will tell," so we won't say that.

We will note (our friend Mort Rosenblum of Reporting Unlimited tipped us to this excellent New York Times analysis) that there is a rising tide of extreme right sentiment all over Europe, but it appears to us that the National Front is still more of a Le Pen family personality cult (witness the generational hand-off) than a political party (think of a far-poorer populist Ross Perot), and that Marine is just a more attractively packaged and more muted version of her father.

4 May Update:  Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy read Paris Play's assessment of the Le Pen family party and found himself in agreement with our conclusion, when he called it the Le Pen family business. 

Here are four short, uncut, high-definition videos of marching, singing, chanting, etc., that will give you even more of the sense of being there. Think of them as uncut newsreel footage. They are Flash, so you might not be able to view them on Apple mobile devices:

We Live In a Political World

Although this is an election year in France, our Dylan-inspired headline doesn't just refer to electoral politics.

Everywhere we turn in Paris, someone's making a statement about something, on sidewalks, walls, fence posts, Metro stations, parked and moving cars, etc.

We've collected some of the socio-political comments we've seen in the last year, which we present below without much comment, only simple translations. Given the fact that it would be rude and presumptuous for us, as immigrants to a new county, to pretend we're au courant on all the nuances, and capable of trenchant commentary, we'll let you simply see what we see.

We see that Parisians live and breathe in a climate where rights--of women, immigrants, minorities, corporations, animals, babies, etc.--are constantly being discussed, debated and argued.

France is reeling, as is the world, from the current economic crisis, and European radicalism being what it is, there's more anti-American and anti-capitalist sentiment on display. And, as we know from American politics, when the economy is bad, demagogues turn against immigrants and against internationalism. Environmental safeguards also take a turn for the worse.

Dechets: waste (toxic, nuclear). OMG: agribusiness, Monsanto. Marées noires: oil spills. 

We can report a few facts about French electoral politics:  Center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy is running for a second five-year term as president, but he is running behind the Socialist challenger, François Hollande, by as much as fifteen points in some opinion polls. The first round of elections is April 22, with the second round on May 6, if no candidate gets a majority. No candidate ever has. The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, whose father led the National Front party for years, ranks third in the polls with around seventeen percent, but she does not yet have the required number of signatures from local mayors around the country (yes, that's how you qualify) to get on the national ballot.

Please remove your brain before entering.

Notre corps nous appartient: Our body belongs to us. Autonomy, abortion and contraception, free and without charge.

Couples, parenthood, stays, change of civil state. Lesbians, gays, bis, transexual and intersexes want equal rights.

Abas, Nazis, Zionists, fascists, racists! Palestine will live! Will conquer!

Progress in the USA. (An electric chair)

Profits are big in order to pay for your health.

Advertising two days of anti-capitalism demonstrations.

To preserve our health and the future of the planet, leave behind nuclear power.

Get involved. Kick him out.

Do something for liberty at Place Stalingrad on May 28th.

You have to get tough, but without losing your tenderness.

No on the government's proposed austerity plan.

Solidarity with the revolt of immigrants against the borders.

"Banlieues" are the suburbs just outside Paris, many of which are heavily immigrant, and in which major protests and riots occurred in the last decade.

The financial sector is killing us.