Winter in Paris

I arrived in Paris December 6^th and remained until the 18^th of the same month. The last time I visited was July 2018, and the most notable difference this time was the weather. Although most days were relatively mild by the standards of Canadian winters, some days were quite cold, with temperatures dipping well below zero. Another remarkable difference was the Christmas decorations; in December there are lovely Christmas trees worth seeing around the city (my favourite one is in front the splendid Notre Dame). Unlike in Toronto, Christmas decorations in Paris are almost completely scrubbed of religious significance. The secularization of the season in not unique to Paris or France, of course; even in Toronto, it has become a mostly commercial enterprise. But elements of the religious meanings are still visible in my home city. For example, a huge nativity scene is conspicuously displayed in front of Toronto’s city hall (something which would be illegal in France), the radio is full of religiously themed Christmas songs, and there are public religious-based events around the city, especially performances such as Handel’s Messiah. The absence of the latter in Paris was rather striking, since it is a timeless masterpiece one may enjoy regardless of its explicitly religious character.

Paris in December of 2018 was also more eventful than during previous visits. The “Gilet Jaunes”, or the yellow vest protesters, perhaps marked my sojourn the most. When Emmanuel Macron was elected, many believed that it was a historical turning point. He defeated the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen, and promised to transform the country into a dynamic, open, market-based society while ushering in reforms at the European level which would finally solve the continent’s seemingly interminable problems. This narrative seemed plausible particularly because in his first year of office, he implemented some radical changes, such as lowering capital gains taxes and liberalizing the labour market, which his predecessors repeatedly tried but failed to do. Below the surface of these successes was simmering resentment among many members of the precarious working class who have a hard time making ends meet. The spark that ignited this fire was a fuel tax intended to help the country move away from dependence on fossil fuels; evidently, Macron ignored or underplayed the tax’s regressive distributional consequences. The new tax would hurt the working classes more: unlike urban high income professionals in large cities with excellent public transit, they have few alternatives to using their cars, and the fuel tax would disproportionately bite their stagnating income. Weekly protests began in November, and accelerated each week; I arrived on Dec 6^th, and a major protest was announced for Dec 9^th; naturally, I wanted to attend. The epicentre was the area around the Arch of Triumph, and when I arrived, it looked a bit like a war zone. Shops were boarded up and closed; streets that would normally be teeming with tourists were empty; and less than twenty metres away from me, fully equipped security forces were launching tear gas at protesters who intermittently charged the barricades (it was very windy and so, lucky for me, the tear gas quickly dissipated). 

Yours truly, with the Yellow Vest protesters

Angry protesters looted stores which were symbols of wealth and overturned or burned expensive cars; these images dominated the international press’s coverage, giving the impression that protesters were mostly anarchists who, rather than being motivated by legitimate grievances, wanted an excuse to satisfy their lust for violence. But this did not fit my observations; most of the yellow vest protesters I saw were members of the working class, and women and men seemed to be equally represented. They were angry at their precarious situation, and their ire was directed to their president; they are convinced that he represents the interests of the rich and not the nation. For a country like France, where equality and social justice are ingrained in the national DNA, Macron’s regressive policies represent nothing less than a betrayal of French identity, an observation confirmed by the nationalist elements at the protests. I heard protesters sing the national anthem, and saw national flags everywhere. Not one European Union flag was visible, and my sense was that most of the protesters are either indifferent to Europe or they see it as a representation of the free market ideology they detest. At the most fundamental level, the protesters demand economic equality, and their willingness to protest violently against the elites continues a long held tradition that goes back to Louis the 14^th; in this sense, there is nothing new under the sun. Unlike, say, Canadians, who tend to be physically passive vis-à-vis their government, the French have a long history of using violence against their rulers. Macron’s government wisely saw the revolutionary potential in the movement, which, in an unlikely but still plausible scenario, could lead to his forced removal from office (and perhaps the removal of his head). He therefore cancelled the carbon tax and announced measures to help the lower working class make ends meet.

 

The riot squad is straight ahead

Another notable event in France during my latest stay was the terrorist attack on December 11th in Strasbourg. The country experienced national traumas in 2015 when jihadists mercilessly slaughtered 130 innocent youths at the Bataclan concert hall and when extremists murdered cartoonists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the weekly satire famous for its no-holds-barred willingness to sacrilegiously attack reigning orthodoxies, both religious and secular. Subsequently, the country was in a state of national emergency, and extraordinary measures were implemented to maximize security. This state of affairs was particularly noticeable during my first and second visits to the country (respectively August 2017 and April 2018). Armed forces, wearing full body vests and carrying machine guns, patrolled most public places where crowds gathered, as they suspiciously gazed at pedestrians, evidently looking for any sign that would trigger (quite literally) the use of lethal force. As the security situation improved, the sense of emergency eased, and by the time of my third visit to the country in July 2018, it seemed as if there were fewer soldiers patrolling the streets. The terrorist attack in Strasbourg threatened to pose a serious obstacle to this progress, particularly at the psychological level, something I sensed while present in the country. For example, I would frequently ride subways with passengers packed like sardines, and after the attack I could not help thinking about how easy a target those trains are. There were no security measures when entering the metro stations, and a terrorist could easily enter during rush hour and set off an explosive device, which, given the concentration of people, would cause maximum causalities, from both the explosion and the ensuing melee as people trampled each over each in the rush for safety. When thinking this in a loaded subway car in the days after the Strasbourg attack, I would look at other passengers and could not help thinking that some were thinking the same thing. At times, it was as if there was some sort of silent communication occurring; a particular momentary glance with a young office worker or an old widow would convey the same unspoken fears and anxieties.

On the other hand, many people have also become desensitized to terrorism, and hence are mostly unbothered by relatively small scale attacks like the one which occurred in Strasbourg. Because of its relative frequency, in France and elsewhere, for many terrorism is a kind of abstraction, something which periodically makes the headlines but which, like all other news stories, is quickly forgotten and replaced with another; modern life’s ephemeral entertainments and distractions quickly re-establish their psychological centrality. Of course, if another attack on the scale of Bataclan were to occur, this equilibrium would be shattered and a politically destabilizing national emergency could follow.

I’ll end this blog post with some reflections on Paris’s famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, which I visited for the second time on December 15^th. It is one of the city’s most popular locations, and for good reason. Many famous people are buried there, including Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison (there are always crowds around the resting places of those two icons, which have become de facto shrines). Another notable feature is the exquisite statues or sculptures which ornate many tombs and, in the process, help to create that sense of the eternal and mysterious which ignites the religious imagination. The tomb of Victor Noir combines both of these features. He was a young journalist who was assigned to fix the terms of a duel between Napoleon 3^rd (Bonaparte’s nephew) and a writer who penned a piece which offended the former’s honour. There are multiple and conflicting interpretations of what happened next, but the guide at Pere Lachaise said that Noir met a tragic end because, as he reached in his pocket to take out his pen, Napoleon thought that he was reaching for a gun, and shot him dead. Twenty years later, the artist Jules Dalou was creating a life-like sculpture which would rest atop his tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery. He wanted to reproduce his body in the state it was in moments after his death, when he was lying lifeless on the floor at the scene of the crime. Dalou believed that one of the body’s reactions after being shot in the head is blood rushing to the genitals. He therefore sculpted an erection onto Noir’s figure, which is visible as a penis-shaped protrusion below his pants. The sculpture of Noir has now become a kind of god of fertility; many women visit his tomb and touch his erected penis in the hope of increasing their chances of conceiving a child. (This is rather ironic in one of the world’s most secular cities).

Victor Noir's erect penis shows signs of frequent rubbing

The last time I visited Pere Lachaise was in the middle of summer (July 2018); this time I visited in mid-December on cold and dreary day. The temperature was just above freezing, and it was pouring rain. Although the weather was disagreeable, it was rather appropriate for the location and the visit. The cemetery, after all, is where the dead repose; below those expensive tombs lie the remains of previously living and breathing people who shared all the joys and pains of life. The most ornate and immaculate statues and tombs cannot disguise the fact that they are reduced to dust, mostly forgotten, and that me and every other visitor will meet the same fate. When seeing the weathered tomb of someone who was buried there in the 19^th and even early 20^th century, it struck me that everybody who walked the earth when this person lived is now gone, and that every person now walking the earth will die just as every previous generation before it. The sunshine will eventually set, the warmth will expire, and the cold and the rain were perhaps a gentle reminder of these inescapable dictates of nature.