Parisistible
Olivia Dean
Column V
The French character is just as contradictory as it is appealing. Addiction to food, wine and cigarettes goes hand in hand with remarkably low obesity rates and a weak catering for plus sizes in clothing. A sense of patriotic unity, that would be considered BNP-esque if it were British, sits comfortably alongside an absolute refusal to be told what to do.
Of course, I exaggerate: the Republic is not quite an anarchy, and if the recent implementation of Covid-19 restriction laws is anything to go by, rules, for the greater part, tend to be obeyed. Yet if we compare the rules that were implemented in France to curb coronavirus to those in England, those put in place across the channel were far harsher to begin with, arguably because the Élysée were aware that, for the most part, its citizens would not fully obey its diktat. It’s like arguing with a toddler about its bedtime: tell the child it has to go to bed an hour before you want it to, ‘compromise’ to the time you actually want, and the child feels victorious. As of a week ago, when I came back to England, the laws in Paris remained strict: masks in all public places, an ‘attestation’ from the government every time you leave the house and the law had only just been relaxed to allow exercise for more than one hour outside the kilometre radius from your home. Harsh, yes, but dishearteningly easy to get around. The (armed) police presence on street level is a palpable scare tactic: not once was I actually stopped and checked, and, in standard gallic form, you can abandon the mask if you’re smoking.
Credit: Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash
As has seemed to become a recurring motif, I inadvertently got stuck in a violent protest in the east of the city when some friends and I were Christmas shopping. Flanked by kilometre-long pillars of police, protesters were demonstrating against a new draft bill that aims to “allay justifiable fears among the police that they are being filmed on duty, identified on social media and endangered in their private lives” (Harding) according to the London Review of Books. The tangible effect of this bill would be the outlawing of filming police, making it significantly harder to prosecute in cases of abuse or misuse of power, particularly pertinent after the recent violent racial abuse of black music producer Michel Zecler in Paris at the hands of four police officers.
Only after violent protest and national outrage did Macron declare that the bill would be re-evaluated. It seems apparent that the centuries-old link between violence and freedom is still prevalent in the French psyche: the (very catchy) post-Revolution national anthem celebrates the ‘soldiers’ of France ripping out the throats of your sons and countrymen. Nice. But this is exactly how the liberty of the Republic was forged: the infrastructure of the nation is built on ferocious fight against the oppressor. It is therefore unsurprising that the people would turn to such protest when quotidian liberty is being so flagrantly threatened.
In an attempt to rub salve into the burns he inflicted, and restore his ‘centre-liberal’ reputation, Macron gave a two-hour-long interview to the online news outlet Brut, notably aimed at the younger demographic amongst which he is supposedly most popular. Grilled on the branding of his plans as ‘illiberal’, he responded, “the situation is not satisfactory but, forgive me, that does not make us an authoritarian state… we’re not Hungary, Turkey or somesuch… I can’t let it be said that we’re reducing liberties in our country” (France24). Appearances in politics are always important; to a certain extent, we never truly know the full workings of what happens beneath the surface. The President seems to have taken this keeping up of appearances to a new level, openly admitting that he does not want to be seen as curbing individual liberties, whilst his actions do just that. It is precisely the same problem as within the French police: rather than dealing with the root issue of racism and excess violence within the gendarmerie, they Polyfilla over it by simply stopping people from finding out about it. The Covid laws seem strict, but their enforcement is not—or perhaps the French police are just not concerned with me, being white after all.
The balance is all out of kilter. I joke when I say the French won’t be told what to do, but, just maybe, this is because their laws are enforced by a prejudiced and power-crazed police force with too many guns and too few questions. Coronavirus restrictions may be marginally bent, but the French understanding of common sense seems to be more clear-sighted than ours: there are fewer punished infractions, much fewer anti-maskers and fewer still questions over the necessity of a lockdown. The protests are against the stripping of the liberty of the individual, not the police as a law-enforcing power.
Credit: Vega Boney-Hundal
In the interview, Macron denounced the actions of the four officers involved in the beating of Zecler, but in the same breath qualified this by saying that this did not mean that the force as a whole was inherently violent and racist. The French appetite for laissez-faire social politics gives a remarkable ability to separate the action or the individual from the whole: take almost every French president from history and you’ll probably find some sort of sex scandal which somehow doesn’t tarnish their reputation in what is, in many respects, a socially conservative country. Former President from the ‘70s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s recent death led to a flurry of obituaries celebrating a tenure under which abortion was legalised, rape was criminalised and divorce with mutual consent was reinstated. With modern perspective it is recognised that none of these breakthroughs stemmed from his personal motivation: once again, he moved with the wave of social progression through his newly appointed female ministers in order to maintain his reputation. An inverted example of separation of the action from the individual: at the end of his presidency, an interviewer asked if he would consider himself a feminist. He refused to say yes, despite the clear emancipatory implications of his actions for women, conceding with a shrug, “I suppose some have said so”.
