disturbances - a cultural production, if you will - is an
account by writer Gregoire Bouillier of what it was like to be
part of the December 8 events on the Champ- Élysées.
Pretty brutal, it turns out.
It is a longish piece, published by Libération. Below:
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So what if this was how it actually happened? Could it be that simple? Could it be today? All of a sudden, I feel myself becoming totally paranoid. In a flash, I see the images of the students arrested at Mantes-la-Jolie and forced to spend hours kneeling with their hands on their heads under the armed surveillance of the CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité) looking very much like Pinochet’s soldiers. Darth Vader for real. Damn it! I suddenly envision the Champs-Élysées transformed into an Elysian camp of prisoners. Only difference in a letter, all told. By a thread. Good God. The worst is possible, here, right away, now. I tell myself that many worsts are possible. They are there, palpable, waiting to pounce, on all sides. From the powers that be; but from the street as well. Because there are occult forces at work on the Fields. I can see. I am not blind. Shit-hole. I need a moment to calm down. I start to wander among the participants, with explosions in the background, intrusive cavalcades, sporadic chaos. I feel like ‘Fabrice à Waterloo’ (Stendhal, bereft of an overview). Find myself ridiculous. What am I doing here? Yellow Vest protesters are chanting ‘Macron resignation! Macron resignation!’ One is howling ’50 million to save the Banks and nothing to save the people?’ He is applauded. All around me, exasperation is mounting. It is principally Macron that is the focus of all the hate. He is clearly a rallying cry. The appointed whipping boy. The punching-ball meant for all. The king whose head must be severed. What the heck, we are in France since 1789. One still believes in the monarchy in these parts, in order to replay the primal revolutionary scene. Even Macron is a believer. He most of all, maybe. Although he is but an image. He is but a face. Decidedly more explicit than many before him, more frank in fact, because one finds with him a morphology typical of today’s dominant class, a type of rigidity which makes him stand out immediately, a smooth and disincarnated fixity in his features which recalls a world essentially dead, as before the prosperous bourgeois would show off their large bellies thus signaling enviable and cynical opulence, yes, but the real problem isn’t him. It never is a problem with a person. Never that simple. Word would get around if that were the truth. Presidents come and go but it is ever the same lot who have it all. Ever the same who rub their hands. The obscenity remains. It even grows, from its own internal rhythm, nice and quiet.
translation: doxa-louise ...
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