The French protest that wasn't

What I learned about politics in Paris this week

Protestors in Paris, and a woman crossing the street (Kiran Ridley / Getty Images)

France girded this week for “Block Everything” protests, and they went off like the last fart of a withering balloon. “France did not come to a standstill or grind to a halt on Wednesday, September 10,” Le Monde reported.

My school had told students to avoid public transit and encouraged “everyone in our community to stay well out of the way of any gatherings or demonstrations.” But I would have sooner moved back to the US before I missed a glimpse of the legendary French barricades. I thought the hourlong walk to campus, across the three inner arrondissements of the Left Bank, would offer a good vantage point.

At the National Assembly, two scooter drivers chauffeured cameramen, who looked blankly through long lenses. Police officers standing in the street sported the faux-seriousness of people trying to be useful, and sirens whined pointlessly along Boulevard Saint-Germain. If shops and restaurants kept closed in the morning, then they were open by lunch, their owners realizing Paris would remain standing. There were no barricades. I didn’t see a single protestor.

“Block Everything” started as a pipe dream of extremely online right wingers, and it gained traction across the political spectrum, morphing into a grab bag of familiar, if amorphous grievances. "It's the same shit; it's the same, it's Macron who's the problem, not the ministers," a public transit union official said to Reuters. "He has to go."

Presumably, the official was referring to now-former prime minister François Bayrou, who in July initiated a political crisis by proposing to eliminate two holidays to help balance the nation’s budget. Far right leaders revolted. Like their American brethren, French conservatives want the government’s hands off their public benefits.

A few days before the “Block Everything” protests, such that they can be called that—an estimated 200,000 people took to the streets across France, a country of nearly 69 million—a friend tried to explain French president Emmanuel Macron’s highwire act of staying in power despite being reviled by so many factions. Basically: He’s handsome and charming. And also: His moderate, pro-business politics peel off enough support from both the left and right, which prevents either pole from winning majorities, and he offloads his political dirty work to his PMs. Macron is now on his sixth prime minister since May 2022.

Zaddy Macron (© Soazig de la Moissonnière)

At the “Block Everything” movement my friend rolled her eyes and said she didn’t know what to expect. Another friend told me Parisians “uniformly despise the far right,” which could explain their indifference. The French government collapsed Monday night after a vote of no confidence in Bayrou, due in large part to the right abandoning him. I was having dinner on a terrace at that very moment. Commuters on bicycles ceded the right of way to no one. Couples strolled, their hands in their partner’s back pockets. Two older women scrunched their faces after a server showed them to a table pinned in by chairs and elbows and thighs. I only heard about the news because the New York Times invaded my phone with a push notification. If the Parisians near me received a similar alert, then they didn’t show it.

Still, I expected the rumors to be true: that protests would bring Paris to a halt, if only temporarily. The government’s collapse assures this, I thought. I was going to learn, firsthand, how French politics work!

Palais Bourbon, the meeting place of the National Assembly (ZeusUpsistos)

I was wrong, and I want to lean on chiché —LMAO truly, nothing comes between them and their food and wine ROFL—or to defer to the government that very kindly lets me live in France. Macron quickly appointed a new PM, assuring there was a hand on the tiller for the day of planned protests, and the government’s show of force probably deterred more aggressive demonstrations.

But I think something truer, if less tangible, was at play, and I learned as much in the absence of protests as I would have in their presence:

1. Politics isn’t a game, so I shouldn’t take a rooting interest. On one end of the spectrum, thousands died and parts of the city were decimated during the Paris Commune. On the other, a few hundred people were arrested as part of “Block Everything." It’s easy to mock disorganized keyboard warriors, but those are a few hundred lives changed inalterably in some way. As at someone’s house, I am a guest and I should be respectful. This is, I think, something immigrants in the US realize quickly. Our political rhetoric belies the fact that, as a rule, immigrants are law-abiding, tax-paying, and hard-working.

2. To actually use a cliché: All politics are local.

No one I talked to in Paris leading up to “Block Everything” showed the slightest interest in it. Not professors, not students, not servers, not friends. My school sent its precautionary email only on the morning of. I hadn’t even known about the movement until someone in the States sent me an article about it after it emerged from the basement of the internet.

It’s not that protests were beneath Parisians. History makes that clear. And it’s not that Parisians are anti-holiday. Of course, they opposed Bayrou’s austerity budget. It’s that Parisians, I sensed, knew the progenitors of “Block Everything” came at the issue cynically.

It’s easy politics to rush to the defense of public holidays and to pile on to an unpopular executive. It’s harder to get up at dawn, tolerate a shoulder in your ribs on the packed metro, and be polite to colleagues and strangers and not want to burn the world down. It’s harder to make and keep appointments, hunt for a seat on the train home, and pay more than ever for groceries and not jealously guard your privileges.

On my first ship in the navy, an older officer greeted us fresh ensigns by saying, “Welcome to the suck.” This is what empathy is—a recognition that we’re all in the suck. Blocking everything is an implicit, and futile, rejection of the ties that bind. Parisians are obsessed with food: They’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff.