by Lauren Elkin
Fault. Faulty. Your fault. My fault. At fault.
OED: ‘fault: a defect, imperfection, blameable quality or feature in physical or intellectual constitution, appearance, structure, workmanship, etc.’
Who bears the fault?
How much can the fault bear?
* * *
Not long after, back in Paris, I ended it.
cross the Seine, north on Boulevard du Palais, cross the Seine, left right left right left on rue de Rivoli, continue for 10 minutes, past the Louvre, past the mini–Arc de Triomphe, into the Tuileries. Here there once stood a palace
PARIS
PROTEST
Ten thousand citizenesses, armed with good muskets, could make the Hôtel de Ville tremble.
– Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
It’s 1848. Once again Paris is in a revolutionary fever, in a swelling of indignation that will surge across Europe, and this time the rebels’ gambit actually pays off. On 24 February, King Louis Philippe abdicates and, with the help of his American dentist, flees to England, he and the queen dressed as commoners, and calling themselves ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’. The people lose no time crashing the Tuileries Palace, looting and sacking and destroying. They take turns sitting on the throne before they throw it out the window, then burning it on the site of what was until sixty years before the Bastille prison. Two days later, the Second Republic is declared.1
During the uprising, on 15 May – a day that will be important for other reasons, but we’ll get there – George Sand, now well and truly famous throughout the land, attended a rally in favour of Polish independence. On her way, she came upon a crowd of people being harangued by a woman in a window. ‘Who is that woman?’ she asked someone in the crowd. ‘George Sand,’ they replied.
She watched the funeral procession for the men who died in the uprising, this time not from the balcony of her tiny flat, but with François Guizot, the recently ousted prime minister, at his home. She recounted to her adopted daughter Augustine: ‘This morning from Guizot’s window, while chatting with Lamartine, I saw the cortege pass by. It was beautiful, simple and touching […] a throng of four hundred thousand people between the Madeleine and the July Column; not a single policeman, not a single constable, yet so much order, decency, calm, and mutual consideration that not one foot was stepped on, not one cap crushed. It was admirable. The people of Paris are the best in the world.’2
Sand was enraptured by the Fête de la Fraternité which took place on 20 April, a massive demonstration that culminated in fireworks at the Arc de Triomphe. In a letter to her son she called it ‘the most massive human event ever produced!’ ‘But then,’ her biographer Belinda Jack comments drily, ‘scenes of huge, peaceable crowds always elicited hyperbole from Sand.’ I can understand that, being deeply moved by a show of solidarity. It’s very powerful to unite a group of people in public defence of an idea. But it’s also very dangerous, as Sand recognised.
That 15th May, the demonstration supporting Poland began at Bastille and headed towards the Place de la Concorde. Part of the group went across the river to the temple-like Palais Bourbon, where the Assemblée Nationale was meeting (and where it meets to this day). There, the splinter group declared the assembly dissolved, and marched onward to the Hôtel de Ville (these are not small distances) where they tried, unsuccessfully, to set up an insurrectionary government. The ringleaders were rounded up and imprisoned.
Sand was aghast. She followed the march for three hours, she told the Prefect of Police, Caussidière, believing, like many in the crowd, that it was a demonstration to support Poland. ‘No one could have predicted the scenes of violence and confusion which would break out in the heart of the National Assembly,’ she said. Most of the Assemblée Nationale were in favour of a resolution supporting Poland, and this pleased the crowd, who were then astonished to find a violent sub-group within their ranks, one that did not ‘in any sense’ express ‘the wishes of the multitude’. But she equally descried the overenthusiastic, even sadistic, police crackdown on the demonstrators. She concluded by warning Caussidière against ‘confus[ing] order, this official word of the past, with the mistrust which embitters and provokes. It is very easy to maintain order without attacking individual liberties. You do not have a right to conquer the people.’3 Sand knew not to trust zealots, no matter whose banner they marched under.
* * *
Living in Paris, I’m always aware of the people’s ability to explode into rebellion, given the right circumstances. Writing about the May 1968 uprising for the New Yorker, the Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant describes her ambivalence towards the events of May, her admiration for the bravery of the students tempered by impatience for the ‘false siege psychosis’ the population indulges in, creating a crisis situation that does not abate for months. It’s true anywhere – any social demonstration will be equal parts sincere and self-mythologising. But the Parisian readiness to stand up and march, to speak truth to power, and to make visible one’s dissent has always impressed me; it’s part of why I wanted to live here. I can’t claim to be exempt from the desire to mythologise it. But I’m aware that this is a dangerous thing to do.
‘Streets are the dwelling place of the collective,’ Walter Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project.4 In the street we can stand together in favour of an idea. Marching is an instinctive response to feeling wronged, or desperate, or compelled to make a statement. It makes us feel stronger to be part of a group. It feels good. Marching is a political act, but it’s a social one as well. We have so few occasions for doing the same thing at the same time, and when we do it we feel we belong to something bigger than us.
After a nineteenth century punctuated with revolutions and a twentieth century strewn with wars and strikes and student revolts, the Parisian manifestation eventually codified into an institutionalised kind of resistance, replacing the frenzied construction of barricades with a slow-moving political trudge. Where they walk to and from is very significant: left-wing marches begin and end at places with revolutionary or Republican significance, like Bastille, or Nation, or République, mostly in the east of Paris. Occasionally they’ll snake along the Left Bank and end in front of the Assemblée Nationale. The right-wing marches, on the other hand, begin or end in the moneyed quarters of the 7th, or the Latin church at Maubert-Mutualité in the 5th.
The ‘manif’ is a rite of passage for most people here; their parents took them when they were kids, and it was part of their coming of age during high school: cutting class to go to a protest is the French lycéen’s version of rebellion. They march in a few at university, and as adults they probably take in one a year. Highly organised affairs, manifs usually represent the interests of several groups who have banded together to appear more imposing. Some enterprising vendors will show up with their barbecues and cook up merguez sausages you can buy for a euro; others sell beer in plastic cups. Assuming there’s nothing particularly tragic on the agenda, it can be quite a jolly affair. When a French friend attended the 15 February protest against the Iraq war in New York in 2003, she was shocked that it ended with the police charging the crowd on horseback; she and her friend had to duck into one of the shops on First Avenue.
Not all Parisian manifestations finish as peacefully as they begin. Protests against an employment law in 2005 that began with students wearing stickers and marching for job security ended up attracting anarchists and rabble-rousers – the casseurs, French for ‘people who break things’ – who are never far from a good protest. Wearing hoods and keffiyehs to hide their faces, they smashed shop windows, set cars on fire, mugged people in the street, threw things at the riot police, and destroyed a legendary bookshop on the Place de la Sorbonne.
In 1986, a young man named Malik Oussekine was accidentally killed while in proximity to a manif, when the police mistook him (or so they claim) for a casseur. The students were marching against fundamental changes to the French university system: tuition was going to be raised by the equivalen
t of two hundred euros (nearly a 100 per cent increase), and a policy of selection would be put in place whereby universities would have the power to accept certain students and not others, which goes against the idea of university as a public right: anyone can attend any French university, so long as they have a high school diploma. Two hundred thousand students demonstrated on 17 November, and then nearly 500,000 on 4 December. A group of students occupied the Sorbonne the next day, and when they were chased out tried to build a barricade at the corner of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince and the rue de Vaugirard. Oussekine himself was apparently not demonstrating, but coming out of a jazz club in the early hours of the morning. The police pursued him on motorcycles and beat him to death.
* * *
When I first moved to Paris, I kept my distance from the demonstrations. You never know what you might get caught up in. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head: Don’t forget that you’re an immigrant. Don’t make trouble. Keep your head down. I think of my father’s experience of 1968; he was in graduate school in Philadelphia, getting his master’s in architecture. It was the end of the semester. Some students (as he tells it) came into the studio and tried to get everyone stirred up about the protests at Columbia. But my father and his fellow students went right back to drawing. Sorry, they said. We’ve got to finish our final projects.
I’ve always wondered if I would have done anything differently. Probably not. Once the movement was already under way, what would it matter if there were one student more or less sitting in Dodge? Then, too, my father’s cousin, Andrew Goodman, had been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 when he went to Mississippi to work for civil rights. That was recent family history, in 1968. I can understand my father’s impulse to stay out of harm’s way.
For most of us on the tail end of Generation X, it took September 11th and the ensuing war on terror, with its twin invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – one for each tower – to dislodge us from our couches and get us out into the street. Though I was horrified by the Bush government’s blind, teeth-gritting march to war, I didn’t immediately join the protesters. Somehow it all seemed too nefarious, fuelled by the interests of corporations and arms dealers, for any of us ordinary citizens to have an impact. What would be the point? I thought. No one in power is going to listen to us shouting No blood for oil! in the street. They’re just going to dismiss us as hippies and idealists.
During those confusing days in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to know who to listen to. I remember a general feeling of helplessness and frustration in New York – our city had been attacked, feelings were running high. We needed a real conversation, I remember thinking, for an anti-war movement to really take off. (This would later prove to be a massive failure on the part of the American media.) What we didn’t need, from either side, was empty rhetoric.
So it was inadvertent that I ended up in a demonstration against the war, that winter of 2003. I was walking home from the library, heading north on University Place from Washington Square Park, trying to lace my way through a group of protesters on the sidewalk, when the police showed up and kettled me along with the marchers. They pushed us into a people-blob and surrounded us with linked arms, creating a nightstick barrier from which we could not escape. One minute I was a graduate student with a backpack full of library books, the next there was a nightstick pushing against my stomach, right under my ribs. The police weren’t distinguishing between marchers and bystanders, or between a peaceful demonstration and a rowdy one.
I’m embarrassed to say it was that day, at that moment, physically restrained by a group of riot police, that my ambivalent feelings about marching resolved into something like a belated epiphany. Because of this war, innocent people were being caught up in a fight they had nothing to do with, and were going to suffer a lot more than a nightstick under the ribs. I had left the house that day feeling distant from the protesters, but by the time I finally made it home, I was one of them.
We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march, or even just stand in one place, not only for those in power to see what the people want, but for people who are decidedly not empowered to see you out there, and to shift, just a little bit, the pebbles of thought in their minds. The protest is not only to show the government that you disagree, but to show your fellow citizens – even the smallest ones – that official policies can and should be disagreed with. To provoke a change. To disrupt easy assumptions.
You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk.
* * *
I marched in my first French manif on 29 January 2009.
Of the 65,000–300,000 people who marched that day (depending who you asked) many were there to protest the way the government had handled the economic crisis. Some were there because they were game for any opportunity to show how much they hated Sarkozy. Some were there because it was a good excuse not to go to work. But this manif was unusual, because for the first time in years, the professors as well as the students were on strike. My colleagues were uniformly against the reforms to the university system put in place by then-Minister of Education Valérie Pécresse, which would favour research in the sciences, and disadvantage those of us in the humanities. They did not address the real problems in the system and would serve only to eliminate jobs, funding and in some cases entire institutions.
Some professors started an ongoing march in the old Place de la Grève [Strike Square], in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and called themselves the ‘ronde infinie des obstinés’, or the ‘unending dance of the stubborn’, and they walked in a circle for seven weeks. It was well intended, but met with the predictable jokes, compounded by the unfortunate slogan they had scrawled on the ground in the centre of their circle: I think, therefore I am useless.
In a more savvy bit of demonstrating, a group of professors organised a marathon reading of Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century novel La Princesse de Clèves. For eight hours, students, professors and passers-by were invited to read a portion of the novel aloud. La Princesse de Clèves is a book with weighty anti-Sarkozyian implications: in 2007, Sarkozy, then running for president, had expressed bafflement about the fact that the novel was on the required reading list for several competitive civil service examinations. An in-depth knowledge of seventeenth-century French literature might not seem all that useful for someone who works behind a desk at the tax office, but there was general outrage at the idea that great literature should be made to serve some useful purpose, here in France, the land of the exception culturelle. The film-maker Christophe Honoré was inspired by Sarkozy’s ignorance to make a twenty-first-century updating of the story, set in a posh Parisian lycée, and the film’s star, Louis Garrel, was one of the readers at the Panthéon protest in 2009. His presence lent another neat revolutionary frisson, since he also starred in The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film about May 1968. In solidarity, I put the novel on my syllabus in a world literature class I taught that year.
Those of us from the English department had a delightful array of discipline-specific signs: ‘I Am Not a Number, I Am a Teacher’, ‘For Us the Bell Tolls’ and ‘University Strikes Back’. We joined the French department, who had their own signs: ‘Fac culturelle, pas fac poubelle!’ and ‘Quand on cherche, on ne compte pas!’ We began in the Place de la Bastille, where we stood still for a very long time, as all the groups slowly arrived and took their places. I was pretty wound up, excited to chant some slogans, ready to pump the air with my fist, but no one else seemed to be; there was no chanting, it was overcast, and everyone was freezing cold. Hours and hours later, we had still only moved about half a mile up the Boulevard Beaumarchais, when it started getting dark, and I decided it was time to head home. The sky deepened from blue to purple as some kids at the back began to set off flares, filling the air with smoke, creating a red glow around the protesters and turning the lamp posts along the boulevard into a string of suns, burning in the haze. A pile of poster boards was set alight as I walked
back through the Place de la Bastille, with a group solemnly gathered around it, holding flags and banners aloft. The smoke rose up around the July Column, and the red haze intensified. I took a photograph, and it was as if the nineteenth century had appeared, like a ghost, on the film.
A week later we were out in the streets protesting again. The energy was high, the press was everywhere, and everyone was happy to be out marching on such a beautiful day. We began at Jussieu, walked past the Jardin des Plantes, down to Censier, up rue Claude Bernard, right on rue d’Ulm, past ENS, and then up to the Panthéon, where the march came to a halt. We were supposed to finish in front of the education minister’s compound, but the police had blocked off all the streets leading to the ministry. So the cortège continued up rue Victor Cousin (‘A la Sorbooooooooonne!’ cried the leaders), left on the rue des Écoles, right on Boulevard Saint-Michel.
Here things got out of hand. Half of the marchers took off leftward on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The other half stayed on Saint-Michel, where the demonstration ended not long after. But there was no way to know that we had gone with the wrong group until later, when it became clear that we were following a group of anarchists who were marching us down the boulevard right into the traffic, running between the cars, which honked at us in complaint. (Or: honked in support?) It was exhilarating. This was a Parisian protest!
Upon realising what had happened, I felt a little silly. This was not a manif in favour of anything or against anything, only a deviation, led by a bunch of troublemakers. I had become exactly what I had avoided back in New York – someone who was more interested in the ritual than the content. It was only too easy. There was brute power in walking, all together, in a pack of people; belonging to a mob for the first time in my life, I felt uneasy. It was too easy to be led who knows where, by who knows whom, to do who knows what.