Archive for category: France
The politics of the Gilets Jaunes are often misunderstood or overlooked, yet the movement should be a point of reference for struggles across Europe.
Neutrality is something that we usually place unto scientific catergories. Catergories such as medicine, are seen a cool, marble like structures that have always been. However, we know this not to be true given numerous examples from the birth to gynecology to the Tuskegee experiements, the medical field always comes with an agenda. In the essay below by Edna Bonhomme, she discusses the impact of Napoleon’s French occupation of Egypt and it’s impact on public health.
At its core the social and political afterlife of disease might work in the service of the empire or against it. French colonialism brought and intensified the bubonic plague epidemic in Egypt and Greater Syria between 1798 and 1801, and the colonizers attempted to manage the plague as a method of social control. The plague was not merely a biological ailment; it prevented the French from advancing in Egypt and Greater Syria. Before French colonization, the Egyptian state handled the plague quite minimally insofar as there were no public health institutions to implement quarantine. Yet a set of contradictions emerged during the occupation, and the French invasion engendered plague as well as new public health enforcement. Meanwhile, French concern for medical treatment did not forestall the epidemic among soldiers.
The French military campaign and the plague were part of an account of social and political control but also a consequence of life under occupation. Denying or minimizing the threat of the disease could function within the matrix of what I call “sanitary imperialism.” In each circumstance, French and Arab officials tailored their oral and written portrayals of the plague to give them an aesthetic appeal that made broader political claims about the French occupation. Moreover, Napoleon altered his position about the plague according to the viability of the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.
The French military occupation of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria is a story of how disease can be destabilized and how systems of control operate on multiple levels. The expedition can be evaluated in terms of the rise of institutions and of French military medicine, as well as along gendered lines.
Although information control and censorship occurred for other reasons, the plague served as a catalyst to the implementation of a colonial hospital and a colonial public-health regulation. In the French case, disease transmission was monitored and controlled by medical practitioners of the French military as they advanced within Ottoman Greater Syria, while playing a particular role in producing and reproducing medical hierarchies. It also had a political role because of French efforts to control it in order to achieve their broader aims of territorial expansion (Elgood 1936; Schur 1999; Howard 2006; Cole 2007). After the French occupation of Egypt, the Mamlūk political leadership was reshuffled; its military structure was discredited and a new layer of leadership stepped in (Fahmy 1997). By 1805, Ottoman Egypt was undergoing another political transformation as Muḥammad ʿAlī established semi-autonomous rule. At the heart of this moment in history was a colonial project in which medicine became modern.
Public Health
Colonial medical regulation was not merely applied to the living—even the dead were not immune from the French occupation. As part of plague and public-health regulations, the French forbade the population from burying the dead in cemeteries close to the communities of al-Azbakiyya and al-Ruway’ī—instead, they were expected to bury the corpses in graves far from the city center. In addition, they ordered Egyptians to hang their clothing and belongings on their roofs for several days after a death from plague to fumigate their homes and reduce the smell and contagion of the disease, arguing that the putrescence could penetrate people’s residences. On 18 Rabī al-Thānī 1213 AH/ September 28, 1798 CE, members of the qawwāsa (indigenous guards that served the French) demolished some graves in the al-Azbakiyya cemetery that resulted in the leveling of some monuments. This was a moment where military occupation prioritized public health over the sacred.
On May 26, 1799, Napoleon sent a letter to the French military Executive Directory, headquartered at Jaffa, and asserted:
The opportunity appeared to be favorable for carrying the place; but our spies, the deserters, and the prisoners, all agreed in stating, that the plague was then making most terrible ravages in the town of Acre [Greater Syria]; that more than sixty persons died of it every day; and that the symptoms of it were dreadful. (Berthier 1990, 11)
The French army perceived the plague as a terror perpetuated by its enemies—those who were no longer serving and those who had been captured. Yet layered in Napoleon’s critique is that these adversaries functioned to shift public perception about the plague. For him, there was consensus that the plague would affect people’s perceptions about the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.[^1] As rumors waxed and waned, the colonial army used medicine to stifle discontent.
As medical practitioners treated their patients, their ideas about the plague were challenged on many fronts. The battlefield was an opportunity for physicians and surgeons to experiment with medical treatment in periods when masses of people were flirting with death. The dynamics of military occupation and knowledge exchange set the stage for strained power relations. Disease emerged at the most volatile moments, and military doctors had to adjust accordingly. In their positions, René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes (1762–1837)—the chief physician—and Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842)—the chief surgeon—documented that the wounded were more susceptible to disease and a quick death. Sanitary imperialism could only be possible with the complicity and cooperation of trained medical practitioners.
The precarity of life existed in a context where military occupation was the norm and illness prevailed.[^2] Of the 9,000 soldiers at Acre, approximately 150 were hospitalized at any given time because of the plague outbreak. Desgenettes commented on his treatment methods for the plague:
In order to sustain immediate hydration and strength, as a matter of urgency, a drink consisting of coffee and quinine, flavored with fresh lemon or lemon juice. The swelling of the glands requires, in principle, a soothing poultice, and when the patient is weak, his tumors must immediately be opened by the application of one or several cauterizing lances. Experience has already shown the effectiveness of this treatment; experience has also proved, through close observation of a great number of cases, that this sickness is not contagious. (La Jonquière1899)
Each treatment and procedure might have been experienced at a radically different pace—what was done for a swelling limp was distinct from what could be done with an open sore. He believed that placing a soft, moist material on the open sores could relieve inflammation and pain. In another, he inserted his lancet into the pus of a bubo and made slight incisions with it. Desgenettes and his medical team were charged with diminishing the spread of infectious diseases. Their ability to treat patients was compromised when other political agendas interfered. Yet, another element of this excerpt is the extent to which he perceives that plague is not contagious which contradicted French perceptions of the disease at the time.
High officials took part in ongoing arguments about methods of treatment for the plague. Desgenettes and Napoleon occasionally disagreed about whether the plague was present and how to treat impaired soldiers. The chief physician insisted on setting an example in the wards by diagnosing the patients with plague and treating them accordingly. Napoleon claimed that plague was merely psychological, stating: “It is one of the peculiar traits of the plague that is most dangerous for those who are afraid of it; those who let themselves be overcome by fear almost always die of it.” Contrary to his initial warning that the bubonic plague was endemic to Jaffa and Cairo, Desgenettes tried to convey to the soldiers that they should not let their anxieties about the disease overcome their bodily strength. Napoleon also insisted that the plague could be attributed to poor hygiene for two reasons: he wanted to maintain control over diagnosis and assert his own medical diagnosis over the military. Nevertheless, physicians appeared to accommodate his wishes through standard treatment and sanitation measures.
Such health sanctions were part of daily practice as an attempt to minimize the spread of infectious diseases—not only the plague. Desgenettes advised his colleagues on how to maintain their hygiene:
The army is informed that it is very advantageous for the health to wash at frequent intervals feet, hands and face with fresh water and even better to wash them with warm water, into which has been poured a few drops of vinegar or alcoholic spirit. (Desgenettes 1835)
But when a soldier fell extremely ill, military doctors sometimes resorted to pharmacological treatment. For example, Napoleon wanted to give doses of opium to the sick in Jaffa. Desgenettes refused. The drug that was eventually used for the dying was laudanum, an opiate solution that could assuage pain (Wilson 1803, 92). The distribution of medication was one way physicians could challenge Napoleon or other top-level authorities. Yet not all top medical officials carried out Napoleon’s orders.
French military physicians constructed temporary hospitals in other structures. Provisional hospitals became part of the campaign. Larrey (1832, 71) documented the condition of one French officer in Egypt:
Peter Genet, a sergeant of the fourth half-brigade of light infantry, aged 30 years, of a dry and bilious temperament, entered the hospital (a farm of Ibrāhīm Bey, in Egypt) on the 4th of October 1800, with every appearance of opisthtonos; his jaws were locked, the muscles of the face convulsively and permanently contracted, the head thrown back upon the trunk, the lower extremities rigid and extended, the walls of the abdomen contracted and approximated to the vertebral column, the pulse small, respiration laborious, deglutition and speech difficult.
The soldier’s ailments become the main concern of the practitioner in a hospital located on a farm of Ibrāhīm Bey. But who was displaced from that farm? Where did they go? Could the fellahin still cultivate the land? The absence of indigenous voices could also be a product of the extent to which displacement was normalized under military occupation. This report shows how colonial spaces were absorbed to secure the army’s health; medical practitioners relied on military occupation to achieve their goals.
Medical reports were one way to produce and control information, and doctors described in detail the nature of the diseases and the condition of the people who contracted them. Although the hospital was a zone where knowledge was controlled and constantly monitored by other officials, a journal, if kept private, could divulge the intricacies of disease incidences and personal life while also pointing to the physical landscape of military occupation.
Desgenettes’s aristocratic background shaped his interactions with Napoleon, and in many respects he challenged Napoleon more than Larrey did. Their positionality as executors of colonial medicine gave them the power and privilege to create new institutions, monitor bodies, and implement policy. Some of the French scholars and Egyptian intermediaries were also part of the public-health machinery to rescind disease transmission. Given the extent to which ideas, goods, and people traveled, the issue of French control was part and parcel of their military campaign. The mandatory reporting they instituted is similar to late-nineteenth-century public-health reforms in Europe and North America (e.g., Rosenberg 1962). What was especially noteworthy about this proclamation was its threat of death as punishment for those who failed to report disease.
On April 17, 1799, the French military was defeated in the siege of Acre. The result was a reshuffling of militarization, public health, and imperialism in Ottoman Egypt and Syria (Tombs and Tombs 2008). Ottoman Egypt renegotiated its position under French occupation, and Mamlūk political leaders used the French defeat for their gain.
Thus, the French enacted public-health regulations as they monitored and negotiated their relationship with the Egyptian population. Most French medical practitioners focused on documenting and treating illness among soldiers. In contrast, al-Jabartī’s chronicle (1994) documented French and Egyptian discourses regarding plague regulations and represents a place where the subaltern voices could be recovered. It also points to the dynamic of French administrators regulating disease transmission by governing the behavior of the indigenous population.
Plague and Gender under Military Occupation
French policies often conflicted with those of Arab medicine and formal medicine was gendered insofar that Arab women medical practitioners were largely shut out of French colonial medical practice. In addition, women of “ill-repute” were blamed for the plague which was an ancillary element of the gender dynamic. Subsequently, the European colonial machinery produced racialized and gendered discourses around health that obscured the medical sphere in Ottoman Egypt and Syria. The French military occupation was a gendered endeavor that was skewed with respect to colonizer and colonized—the majority of the French occupying force was male, while the Arabs who were being colonized were of mixed gender. Gender featured in the colonial project in overt and covert ways, with the predominant literate perspectives those of men, leading to the historical erasure of many women (Solnit 2017).[^3] Yet, within this colonial matrix, plague and power unearth the gendered dynamics of contagion and therapeutics.
Following on the theme of social discourses on the plague, the French military perceived all Egyptians vectors as vectors of disease and Egyptian women were especially charged with being blamed. For example, the Assembly of the General Dīwān had the following proclamation:
After consideration, we have discerned that the shortest and most auspicious means for alleviating or preventing the danger, i.e., the ailment of the plague was derived by associating with women of ill-repute, for they are the primary vehicle for the above-mentioned ailment. (Boustany and Jabartī1971, 65)
This assumption is riddled with misogyny because women, not men, were blamed for transmitting the disease. Up to this point, plague transmission was attributed to close contact with an infected person, irrespective of gender. This narrative positioned women of “ill-repute” as progenitors of disease and this could be interpreted in several ways. This could refer to women who were not regarded as practicing Muslims or sex workers; this is not entirely clear from al-Jabartī’s text. Nonetheless, discussions about the plague were gendered, and this document ascribes blame to certain women as vectors of disease.
There is a history where women are blamed, reproached, and chastised for transmitting disease. Yet this comes with a social force whereby disease can be an arbiter for broader political commitments. As the philosopher and writer Susan Sontag noted in Illness as Metaphor (1979, 38), “In its role as scourge, syphilis implied a moral judgment (about off-limits sex, about prostitution) but not a psychological one.” In much the same way, the plague functioned within the realm of moral judgment: the colonizer used moral discernment to set the tone and regulation for diseased bodies.
Medical pluralism was the norm in Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria and in the broader Islamicate world, from al-Andalus to Persia. Consequently, Arab-Islamic scholars negotiated between classical Greek texts, Qurʾānic text, Sunnah, and the occult sciences to generate definitions and therapies for illness.[^4] Understanding premodern and early modern definitions, debates, and negotiations about contagion and disease helps to elucidate the theories and practices of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria.[^5] Moreover, eighteenth-century Arab medical practitioners were mostly divided along gendered lines; with midwives (dayas) mostly female and health barbers (halaq al-sihhas) mostly male (Gallagher 1990). Nevertheless, these medical practitioners used similar methods to ward off the plague (and anxieties) when an epidemic struck: rubbing oil on buboes, drinking a rose-infused elixir, hanging a magic square on one’s door. In addition to prayer, a person was expected to clean his/her body and house and give alms. The timing of prayer was also important for its effectiveness—dawn was the optimal period.
Traditional remedies were diverse, and domesticated plants played an important role in medieval Arab pharmacology and the remedies directly applied to boils (Amster 2013; Levey 1973). Herbs, ointments and spices were seen as both preventive and curative agents for the plague and were part of the political economy of therapeutics. The sixteenth century Muslim scholar Al-Suyūṭī (d. 911 AH/1505 CE) surmised that people used violet infused ointments to prevent the buboes from spreading to other portions of the body. As such, the eighteenth-century Egyptian ʿulamāʾ ‘Abd al-Mu’ṭā al-Sahalāwī (unpublished manuscript) reached similar conclusions to Arab medical philosophers and surmised that violet was a curative agent for the plague. Doctors, pharmacists, and blood-letters could profit from the plague insofar that they advocated for an herb and provided it to their willing and sometimes dying patient.
Moreover, traditional Egyptian medical practices were recorded in Kitab al-Khawāss (Book of Occult Properties) and Aḥmad al-Dairabī’s (d. 1151 AH/1738 CE) Kitab al-Mujarabāt (Book of Remedies) (YEAR) to find cures for a range of diseases, including impotence or the plague. The occult sciences complicated elite and religious notions of medicine and the natural world. What made occult practices “acceptable” for those who considered themselves pious was the incorporation of Qurʾānic prayers.
One strain of ḥadīth literature (a compilation of axioms by the Prophet Muḥammad; see Burton 1994) prohibited people from leaving areas infected by plague; other sayings warned travelers not to enter places where plague was known to be present. This argument was supplanted by another corpus of literature arguing that pious Muslims who died from the plague were martyrs (Conrad 1981). What this meant was that authorities could force people to remain in a plague-infected area—even if they wanted to escape its wrath. In practice, this meant that the Muslim segment of the population might avoid treatment or quarantine with the presumption that they might have salvation. Thus, some interpretations of prophetic law were discordant with the French response to the plague. For this reason, French soldiers who exhibited plague-like symptoms blamed local inhabitants, thereby justifying their control over the population.
Overall, the proximity of popular remedies and religious practices during the eighteenth century represented significant social reactions to the plague and operated within a broader medical community of medical philosophers, medical practitioners, and shifting political structures. In a colonial context where an invading army wanted to maintain a particular kind of health, traditional medicine was obscured, and Arab women health practitioners were mostly excluded.
Conclusion
At its core, the social and political afterlife of disease might work in the service of the empire or against it. Late eighteenth-century perceptions of the plague were fragmented and contested; those with authority and power were better positioned to put their ideas about the plague into practice. French colonialism brought and intensified the bubonic plague epidemic in Egypt and Greater Syria between 1798 and 1801, and the colonizers attempted to manage the plague as a method of social control. The plague was not merely a biological ailment; it prevented the French from advancing in Egypt and Greater Syria. Before French colonization, the Egyptian state handled the plague quite minimally insofar as there were no public health institutions to implement quarantine (Mikhail 2011). Yet a set of contradictions emerged during the occupation, and the French invasion engendered plague as well as new public health enforcement. Meanwhile, French concern for medical treatment did not forestall the epidemic among soldiers (Sonbol 1991; Kuhnke 1990; Gallagher 1990).
The French military campaign and the plague were part of an account of social and political control but also a consequence of life under occupation. Denying or minimizing the threat of the disease could function within the matrix of what I call “sanitary imperialism.” In each circumstance, French and Arab officials tailored their oral and written portrayals of the plague to give them an aesthetic appeal that made broader political claims about the French occupation. Moreover, Napoleon altered his position about the plague according to the viability of the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.
The French military occupation of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria is a story of how disease can be destabilized and how systems of control operate on multiple levels. The expedition can be evaluated in terms of the rise of institutions and of French military medicine, as well as along gendered lines.
Although information control and censorship occurred for other reasons, the plague served as a catalyst to the implementation of a colonial hospital and a colonial public-health regulation. In the French case, disease transmission was monitored and controlled by medical practitioners of the French military as they advanced within Ottoman Greater Syria, while playing a particular role in producing and reproducing medical hierarchies. It also had a political role because of French efforts to control it in order to achieve their broader aims of territorial expansion (Elgood 1936; Schur 1999; Howard 2006; Cole 2007). After the French occupation of Egypt, the Mamlūk political leadership was reshuffled; its military structure was discredited and a new layer of leadership stepped in (Fahmy 1997). By 1805, Ottoman Egypt was undergoing another political transformation as Muḥammad ʿAlī established semi-autonomous rule. At the heart of this moment in history was a colonial project in which medicine became modern.
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On June 2, more than 40,000 people flocked to a rally in Paris in solidarity with the anti-racist uprising taking place across the United States and to protest France’s own despicable record of racist police brutality. The demonstration defied a nationwide ban on protests and gatherings instituted by Emmanuel Macron’s government to stop the spread of coronavirus but that has been used to quell the dissent of France’s historic general strike earlier this year. As with the curfews declared in many U.S. cities, the French state is implementing severe repression to control opposition and repress protesters; however, protesters turned out in huge numbers to stand up against police brutality and France’s long history of racist and imperialist violence.
Adama il doit être tellement fier de sa sœur depuis 4 ans elle et toujours à fond dans le combat 👏👏 #JusticePourAdama #AdamaTraoré pic.twitter.com/fdxDrk90C8
— maestro jr 🦁⚽️ (@robiingo10) June 2, 2020
The demonstration was organized by the “Truth for Adama” collective, a group that demands justice for the death of a young Black man, Adama Traoré, who was murdered in police custody in 2016 on his 24th birthday. While the protest was called in solidarity with protests in the United States over the murder of George Floyd and other Black lives taken by the police, it took on greater significance in light of new evidence in the Traoré case that proves he was killed by beatings he received from police while in custody. For years, misleading medical reports have been used to exonerate the murderous police officers. The people in the streets this week demand the prosecution of Traoré’s killers, who have been protected by the state for too long.
But Tuesday’s protest — the largest since the country’s lockdown measures began — is also an outpouring of outrage in response to the police repression meted out daily against Black people and immigrants across France during the quarantine, especially those living in working-class neighborhoods who already face gutted healthcare services and high mortality rates from Covid-19. Just last month, protests broke out in a working-class neighborhood outside Paris against the police killing of a motorcyclist who was hit with a police vehicle. The police used the lockdown restrictions as justification for an intensely violent response in which they beat outnumbered protesters.
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Hours before the June 2 demonstration, the head of police in Paris reinforced the lockdown order, declaring the protest illegal and deploying riot police across the city. Despite this attempt to discourage the mobilization, tens of thousands of people gathered outside of Paris’s main courthouse to hear Traoré’s sister, Assa Traoré, who called for justice for George Floyd and her brother. Surrounded by fists raised in solidarity, Assa connected the struggles against racism in France and the United States.
“What is happening in the United States today has brought to light what is happening in France …Today, it’s not just the fight of the Traoré family, it’s your fight,” she declared. “Today, when we fight for George Floyd, we fight for Adama Traoré.”
Young people, activists, and contingents from France’s unions took to the streets in a display of international rage, highlighting for all the world to see that capitalism’s racism is global and that working and oppressed people will not tolerate racist injustice any longer. With young people of color at the frontlines, protesters held signs that echoed those of protesters in the United States.
“I want to breathe!”
“Our lives matter!”
“Racism suffocates us!”
Image: Révolution Permanente
Shortly after the rally began, as cop cars burned in the streets and marchers chanted “No justice, no peace!” French riot police descended on the protests in full force with tear gas and batons, making mass arrests. As police rushed the crowds to disperse them, several protesters reported they were tear gassed as they took refuge in a subway entrance.
The repression, however, could not stem the anger and determination of the demonstrators, who fought back against the police. As firefighters put out flames in one section of the city, protesters took a knee and raised their fists in solidarity with the anti-racist struggle around the world and against the history of racism that France’s “liberal” government tries to deny. As one demonstrator, Florian, told Révolution Permanente, “Our lives don’t count … crimes go unpunished. They shoot at us like rabbits. It’s been going on for too long.”
AHORA: Protestas en París, Francia. La policía dispersó la movilización lanzando gases. pic.twitter.com/LjJDnD8uBm
— Mundo en Conflicto (@MundoEConflicto) June 2, 2020
These events in Paris show that governments around the world will do whatever it takes to suppress the now global movement against police brutality and racism. Lockdowns and curfews instituted by the state are nothing but tools of repression to target protesters, especially people of color. But beyond this, the Paris demonstration shows that we are not alone. The amazing demonstration of French solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States proves once again that the anti-racist struggle is international. Across the world, people are waking up to the fact that police violence is not an accumulation of individual incidents. It’s not a few bad cops. It’s a central pillar of an inherently racist system that stretches across the world — and from France to the United States, the whole thing has to go.
The following text is adapted from the contribution of Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes to a panel at the Historical Materialism conference in London. The text has been published here and on Notes from Below.
The uprising of the YVs (Yellow Vests or the “mouvement des gilets jaunes”) and its persistent tenacity mark a point of no return. In our opinion, there is a before and an after the YVs. At least in Europe and in terms of class struggle.
Ten days ahead of its first anniversary, we are here in London to present a viewpoint that is situated and immanent to the emergence of the YVs, based on our militant practices and interventions. We do so, therefore, with our eyes turned back, to the last 12 months, to tell you what has happened so far, but with our hearts and heads set towards the future; the future not only of this new and powerful movement, but – more generally – the future of class struggle in Europe.
The YVs are indeed the strongest movement that has emerged on the scene of the old continent between the late 1970s and today. Moreover, the YVs make for a movement that has crystallized and exploded many of the contradictions that exist in today’s world, anticipating several issues that concern our future.
The YVs movement is first and foremost an autonomous movement – that is, a movement that was born, has taken shape and has grown outside any institutional framework. Also, it is an anti-crisis movement – that is, it gives substance to a self-organized response from below against the brutal deterioration of the living and working conditions of the middle and lower classes, and against the authoritarian turn of the state machine. Since the crisis of liberal democracy, the crisis of capital and the crisis of the institutional left do not seem to be fading away, the emergence of the YVs speaks not only of our recent past and present, but also largely of the near future and our political tasks.
After four decades of neoliberal reaction and after the radicalization and strengthening of processes of neoliberalization following the 2008 crisis, the YVs were the only movement, at least in Europe, to win victories in the cycle of struggles that began in 2011: Emmanuel Macron, “the President of the Rich,” had indeed to withdraw the carbon tax, concede a series of more or less symbolic measures, but above all exceed the budgetary limits imposed by the Brussels “golden rules”. Even worse, Macron had to slow down, or in some cases defer, the agenda of neoliberal reforms – which has further increased the tensions already existing among the European ruling class, between the supporters of the federalist turn and the supporters of the confederalist perspective, as is particularly clear within the European Central Bank (ECB) board.
That said, by way of introduction, it is very difficult to account for the richness and variety of a movement like the YVs in 20 minutes, for several reasons. First of all, because it is an extremely heterogeneous movement. Its social composition – transversal to the poor or impoverished – is not only closely linked to the spatial composition of the different parts of the country that mobilize, but it can change rather significantly between assemblies that are not too far apart geographically. At least, this is what we were able to notice when we joined the popular assemblies of Paris and its suburbs (as MIP (Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes) we are present in five different assemblies). Moreover, the movement is present throughout France, so you understand the difficulties of mapping the YVs. However, if we want to sketch out a somewhat wild socio-geographic radiography of the movement, we can say two things. From the point of view of social composition, it is not the lower strata of society or the middle classes that are at the forefront of the dynamics of the movement, but rather the social segments in between, that is, those impoverished workers who are going through major downgrading processes of worsening of their social conditions, and who see the future in a darker way than they could ever have imagined before the crisis. From the point of view of spatial composition, it is neither the working-class districts nor the city centers that are most active, but the peri-urban areas, the inner suburbs, the diffuse peripheries, i.e. these semi-rural and semi-urban spaces that constitute a limbo from both a socio-economic and political point of view. Finally, with regard to its subjective composition, it should be added that this is a fairly old movement (the average age of the YVs being between 45 and 50 years), with a strong female presence, i.e. women, and middle-aged women in particular, still playing a very important role.
The second difficulty is that this is a movement that has been going on for a year, i.e. it now has a certain longevity. During this time, the movement has mutated and gone through different phases, depending on the evolution of its organizational process, but also on the tactics put in place by the government to contain, divert, repress it, etc. The movement thus experienced peaks in intensity (the first four weeks, 16th March, 14th July), moments of decline (during the election campaign for European elections, in August, in October), moments of high contamination (on 5th February and 1st May with grassroots trade unions, the anti-racist and suburban marches of February and July, in September with the ecological protests). That is, the movement has continued to be important for supporting ongoing struggles, whether local and linked to a territory, or sector-specific and labor-related. And November 2019 is a month full of events: the movement is in fact far from over…
Third, it is difficult to report in 20 minutes on this movement because of the plurality of its forms of action. The YVs have thoroughly renewed the practices of blocking, assembly and demonstration, while practicing self-inquiry in an extremely interesting way. Beyond the occupations of the buildings known as People’s Houses (Maisons du Peuple), and beyond the free-toll (péage-gratuit) actions, what characterized the movement were four forms of actions:
- circulation blockades, also in particularly strategic roundabouts as far as the flow of commodities or the flow of people are concerned – the issue being not only economic blockage, but also visibility and exchange with other citizens
- the transformation of these blockades into occupations, and the proliferation of assembly spaces, which immediately became the focus of the movement’s self-organization and places of sociability, mutual aid and solidarity
- it is within the occupied roundabouts and local assemblies that the YVs have constantly discussed among themselves, drawn up questionnaires, compiled lists of grievances (cahiers de doléances), put forward their revendications: in short, in these spaces the YV have carried on practices of militant self-inquiry, by way of improving overall political perspectives and constantly organizing actions, the spectrum of which ranges from sabotage and offensive practices to peaceful and symbolic initiatives
- the transformation of the classic demonstration (the marches established in agreement with the police prefecture) into a weekly riot meeting in the rich districts of French metropolises, where looting of shops can go hand in hand with urban guerrilla warfare with an almost insurrectional content.
Of course, this plurality of forms of action must always be considered within precise spatio-temporal coordinates. In short, the practices of the movement vary in time and space.
However, if we want to try to politically synthesize this subjective, social, spatial, temporal and practical multiplicity, we can say – this is our thesis – that the movement has produced the inseparable unity of the social question and the political question; it has said loud and clear that the social is political and that the political is anchored in the social. More money and more direct democracy, or – we could say – more income and more autonomy. If we want to reduce the movement to its core, we could risk to claim what follows: according to the YVs, the material problems of the production and reproduction of life must be dealt with collectively, and direct democracy cannot be limited to the simple liberation/circulation of speech. The refusal of representation and delegation, the demands for fiscal justice and Macron’s dismissal, the politicization of ecological issues, but also the rediscovery of human warmth, social ties and fraternity, all this shows well that, within the movement of the YVs, only through the involvement of oneself, in the first person, in a community of struggle can one hope to change the relations of power in force today. The staggering unleashing of juridical, police and also symbolic violence against the movement (let us think of the contemptuous and arrogant treatment reserved by the media to the movement) clearly shows that the YVs have succeeded in turning these power relations upside down like no one before them – at least in Europe since the 1970s!
But let us return to the origin of the movement and its different phases. To be realistic, the genealogy of the YVs must begin a little more than a month before the 17th November 2018, which was the inaugural date of the mobilization. This movement does not emerge from social spaces that are constituted a priori, and this is the first element that makes of it an autonomous movement, in the sense that from its origins it is separated from a pre-existing organizational base. Very early on, even before the movement appears as such in the public space, on the local scale forms of organization are put in place, in parallel with the diffusion of slogans that circulate on social networks – such as the one that will give the movement its name, the yellow vest, intended to be placed in front of the cars of angry users against a new fuel tax. These kinds of problems, which are generally dealt with by (right-wing) associations defending motorists, are here invested in a much more global way, by a much broader social base than the one we usually see at work in this kind of circumstances. Therefore, what is invested from the beginning in the YVs movement is not access to the road, or claims over a driving practice, but the very possibility of using the car as a working or reproductive tool that is absolutely essential in the diffuse peripheries that we mentioned above. Once this has been said, it is extremely difficult not to read the yellow vest movement as the emergence of a social conflict linked to extractivist practices of the state in the field of taxation, but also as the socialization of an essential means of production such as the car.
However, it was not until 17th November 2018 that the movement really emerges as a political force in the sense that it begins to embody a level of antagonism that has not been seen in France – and more broadly in Europe – for several decades. 17th November is placed under the sign of blockage as a mass political practice: it is the first investment of the roundabout, reclaimed by the YVs to become both an organizational space but also a blockage point for the commercial and industrial zones that mark the fabric of peri-urban and rural France – even the Arc du Triomphe, one could say, is a roundabout…!
It is in parallel with this exacerbated conflict that the movement’s slogans widens, totally contradicting the thesis of a Poujadist movement: the movement demands the return of the wealth tax abolished a few months earlier by the government, and the dismissal of the President himself, to immediately turn to address a much broader spectrum of demands. It is as a result of this powerful mobilization – which brought the riots to places where they had been absent since the Paris Commune – that the French government makes its first concessions: “They were content to drop a ridiculous suspension of fuel taxes for the year 2019, amounting to 4 billion, which represents an offering of 6 cents for diesel and 3 cents for gasoline”.
From this point on, the YVs movement has continued to reinvent itself to the point that the story of each phase would take several hours to be detailed. We can say that, at first, the movement is deployed according to a double temporality, spatially determined: the occupations and blockages take place throughout the week and throughout France, and the demonstrations unroll in the beautiful districts of Paris (and other cities) on Saturday mornings and afternoons. The absolute autonomy of the movement and its political agenda, combined with a very high degree of participation and antagonism, has prevented the government from finding real “exit strategies for the crisis,” forcing it to constantly change its tactics, which – in turn – has been at the root of many shifts in the practices and perspectives of the YVs.
To stay always in the early phases of the movement, one of the first slogans of the YVs has been the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (CIR). The investment of the YVs with this slogan must be understood above all as a consequence of the permanent articulation of the social and political struggle rather than as a trademark of the movement’s supposed sovereignism, or its purely formal attachment to democracy. The criticism of much of the radical left, which consisted in putting forward the idea that “it is not the CIR that pays the bills,” only deepened its separation from the YVs movement. As for us, as MIP, we preferred to avoid the double pitfall of Marxist vulgate (“money before CIR,” “le fric avant le Ric”) and political sociology (the procedural aridity of the CIR), to treat it from a point of view immanent to the movement, its composition and its tactics, which in these early phases have entirely been under construction.
In this respect, it is important to be very clear on one point: the right, the Front National (FN), the followers of a dubious Frexit, and small neo-fascist groups, have definitively lost all hegemonic aspiration on the movement from February onwards. And this has not been the result of leftist criticism of the movement, but the fruit of collective intelligence that has matured in the daily practice of direct democracy. Beyond the physical expulsion of neo-fascist and reactionary groups from the streets and assemblies, what shifted the movement’s support to other fronts of social and anti-racist struggles, is on the one hand the exercise of sharing the experiences of protest and blockage, of freeing speech, and of incessant confrontation within assemblies; and on the other hand the unparalleled detestation of the police due to the countless mutilations committed by police forces. From this point on, in the landscape of French parliamentary politics the centrality of the question of the police and of the “support for the police” has been decisive in separating the YVs from sovereignist entrepreneurs – both from right and left.
Then, since the very beginning of 2019, when the insurrectional power of the movement has begun to resize, the prospect of a confederation of assemblies launched in Commercy (a small village in northeastern France) has been increasingly emerging. This initiative, inspired by Kurdish democratic confederalism, has brought together up to 300 local assemblies to discuss the political lines of the movement in four occasions (in January, April, June and last weekend). While continuing to guarantee “all power to local assemblies,” the AoA (Assembly of Assemblies) has immediately appeared to be an extremely important framework to be invested for structuring the movement. The size of the AoA offers the possibility of a national meeting beyond the Saturday “acts” in Paris or in other major French cities, and it constitutes a very interesting political space, both as a tool for knowledge among the different local experiences, and as a tool for harmonizing the practices and perspectives of the whole movement. To give just one example, during the AoA held last weekend in Montpellier, which brought together more than 600 delegates from 300 local assemblies, seven working tables were set up, on:
- the improvement of the organizational structure of the AoA itself
- the relations to be developed with the rest of the population
- the identification of our enemies or opponents
- the preparation of the first anniversary of the movement, that will take place next weekend
- how to act in the context of municipal elections
- how to relate to other movements (including the environmental movement and the trade union movement)
- the renewal of internationalism at a time when powerful popular revolts are breaking out all over the world
As we can see, the political subjectivation of the YVs and the forms of counter-power that the movement has been able to develop so far seem to us to have great political potential. In this respect, following the success of the last AoA, a week before the first anniversary of the YVs, shortly before the next youth climate strike, on the eve of a strike movement against pension reform that promises to be quite significant, in a transnational context of social upheaval, it seems to us that the situation is and remains, at least in France, highly explosive. And the fact that the Montpellier AoA has produced three calls (to invest on November 16-17, to celebrate this anniversary all over the world, to commit to the strikes of December against pension reform) seems to us a very promising political fact!
The post Back to the Future: The Yellow Vests Movement and the Riddle of Organization appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.
One year on, divisions in the country persist and yellow vest protests are expected to surge
In a kebab shop on the outskirts of Bordeaux, Christine, 48, was planning the next steps of the local gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement.
“We might seem less visible, but we’re still out here,” said the cardiac nurse who left her job after a “burn out” – like “so many” healthcare staff. “Some don’t want to wear a yellow vest anymore because of being targeted by police, but we’re organising meetings, mobilising citizens and we’ve still got public support. We’ve created a new sense of solidarity in France and that won’t go away.”
November 2019 has arrived, bringing in its wake the one year anniversary of the Gilets Jaunes. Those who talked about running out of steam in January, then this spring, then again this summer, still don’t get it: the essence of the movement, encoded in its DNA, is that it can’t end. Each social movement has its own temporality, its own specificity, its own way of ending. A few months after a huge strike, mass protests or popular uprisings, the media and political experts wrap up the sequence in newspaper and file it away in the archives of History.