Acts 30 and 31: Les Gilets Jaunes into the Banlieue and Beyond
The coverage of the Gilets Jaunes protests on June 8 from the major newspapers and television stations was sharply down, as were their numbers. The Ministry of the Interior calculated the turn-out at 10,300 throughout the country, up by nearly 1,000 from the previous Saturday; those Interior numbers, which have been strongly contested every week by the Gilets Jaunes, nevertheless indicate that the demonstration was a minor one. Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, who has promised the nation that he will stop saying his sarcastic “petites phrases,” nevertheless had already groused in early February that the media gave as much time to “JoJo with a yellow vest” as they did to ministers and deputies (L’Express).
Act 30 on June 8 did, however, receive extensive coverage from RT, or as it was formerly known, Russia Today (in France), with an assist from Sputnik news and the Berlin-based Ruptly livestream. All are funded by the Russian government. I’ll discuss these sources, and the issues they have raised in France, below.
In the meantime, the “Acte I in the banlieue” represented a quixotic attempt by a relatively small group of Gilets Jaunes to build bridges between themselves and those in the urban periphery of Paris. “Banlieue” is usually translated as suburb; but instead of manicured lawns and single family homes, the Paris banlieues are known for towering apartment complexes called cités, for drugs, crime, and aggressive policing, for the high presence of immigrants and people of color–a stereotype, but one that is also based on the reality of poverty and segregation. The outreach by the Gilets Jaunes thus was significant as an attempt to find common ground and to link the two groups, those of the periphery and those of the slums, as equally living in insecurity and end-of-the-month anxiety. (See a discussion and photos of the banlieue in The Funambulist.) The march went from Courneuve to Bobigny, and was mostly peaceful, uneventful–and met largely, it would seem, with indifference from the residents.
The embrace of the the banlieues provided an interesting illustration of the impasse the movement has reached, and was itself an attempt to find a new path. One of the advocates of this attempt was a longtime neighborhood activist, Faouzi Lellouche. Though the Gilets Jaunes have refused to acknowledge leaders, there are nevertheless a number of media-friendly figures who have become familiar, like Lellouche, who spoke on RT on the evening of Act 30. Lellouche has been deeply involved in Sevran, the very poorest of the quartiers in “93,” or Seine-Saint-Denis, to the northeast of Paris.
In April 2017, Al Jazeera featured the work of Lellouche and his wife in opening a school, El-Baraka (meaning “blessing”), for young people in their neighborhood. (Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar.) By May 2018 Lellouche had renamed his group Accès Cible (Target Access); the original name had proved to be a divisive distraction from the work. Lellouche had raised money for a sports center for neighborhood youth and had applied for a government grant to get it going. But he also, as late as spring 2018, had high hopes for Macron, who had appointed Jean-Louis Borloo to draw up a comprehensive plan for the revitalization of the banlieues (Le Parisien). (See the main points of the Borloo plan in The Local.)
Borloo had served in the Chirac and Sarkozy administrations as minister of ecology, energy, and sustainable development (twice) and of economy and finance. He worked hard on the plan, immersing himself in the neighborhoods, communicating with activists (including Lellouche), and drafting what he had hoped would be the foundation for a new “republicain equality.” On May 22, 2018, after sitting on the report for about a month, Macron publicly dismissed it as a case of “two white males” coming up with a blueprint for the banlieues, “a method ‘as old as he is’” (Borloo was then 67; thus a joke), and a method which “no longer works” (Le Figaro).
After rudely tossing out the plan (Le Figaro described the event as a “public humiliation” of Borloo), Macron had immediately put together a Conseil présidentiel des villes–which, a year later, in the spring of 2019, and in the midst of the gilets jaunes movement, had found itself with no power and little access to the president. The final straw was the absence of any banlieue plan in the reforms proposed at the conclusion of Macron’s “Great Debate,” the two-month series of meetings throughout the country as a response to the Gilets Jaunes. (When questioned, Macron stated that the gilets jaunes had made no demands in regard to the banlieues; hence, no plan.) Mohammed Mechmache, founder of Pas sans Nous (Not without Us) stated that he was unwilling to serve any longer as “window dressing”; Hassan Hammou of Marseille’s Trop jeune pour mourir (Too Young to Die) stated that the Conseil had been organized only to make people forget the “brutal abandonment” of the Borloo report (franceinter).
Act 30 thus was an attempt to recruit the potential power of the banlieue by stressing that they shared numerous problems with white, small-town protesters; in the following interview, it is noteworthy that Lellouche stays away from any mention of race, ethnic, or religious differences.
The questioner on RT framed this trip to the periphery of Paris as an attempt to revive the movement; Lellouche resisted this interpretation, and turned instead to an explanation based on the nature of the repression, from fines, to arrests, to convictions, to serious injuries from rubber bullets, police clubs, and tear gas. (Investigations of police conduct are continuing.)
Act 31, on June 15, featured a call for all Gilets Jaunes to go to Toulouse, a frequent site of the Saturday protests, where the participants were quickly disabused of any thoughts that the demonstration would pass without challenge. CNews provided brief coverage.
And here is the report, equally brief, from RT; in the case of RT, however, this update was supplemented by a livestream of the event (as they have live-streamed all the Acts), interviews, and other reports.
So: RT.
There is a noticeable difference in tone between these two broadcasts. The audio on RT sounds as if the reporter is in a war zone; he is in the midst of the demonstrations, with a natural stress level that is reflected in his voice; he is bonding with his small group, as they struggle to evade the police; he repeats that the situation is “chaotic” at least twice, and “chaotic situation at Toulouse” is also the title of the video on youtube.
In early January 2019, after the media had stopped wondering “whether” the Gilets Jaunes would turn out on the next Saturday, Le Monde noted that the fortunes of RT, or Russia Today, had risen with those of the protesters. The viewings of RT videos on Facebook had quadrupled, to 22 million. And the Gilets Jaunes liked them, singing “Merci, RT,” in late December (Le Monde, January 5, 2019).
Journalists from BFMTV, CNews, LCI, and franceinfo have sometimes been threatened by the protesters; RT has not been, but at the same time plays the underdog, closed out by the establishment; they do not have a broadcast channel, but are available only over the internet (L’Opinion, January 12, 2019). Even before the Gilets Jaunes, the Elysées Palace had refused them press credentials; government ministers do not appear on the network, though some LREM deputies occasionally do. Macron regards them as purveyors of “lying, deceptive propaganda” (Le Monde, January 5, 2019).
Xenia Fedorova, the director of RT France, said that the Gilets Jaunes favor her reporters because RT lets them speak. Le Monde has also suggested that another source of their popularity is their affiliate Ruptly, which livestreams the Acts for hours, thus giving the impression of authenticity as well as “immersion” in the protest (Le Monde, January 5, 2019). The preference for “le live” and the longform itself–rather than edited, predigested transmissions at a later date–has boosted not only RT but a number of other Gilets Jaunes-affiliated channels, such as Vécu on Facebook. (Le Point, January 12, 2019).
As a historian of nineteenth century insurgencies in Paris (Barricades: The War of the Streets in Paris, 1830-1848 [2002]), I have used police interrogations, courtroom testimony, and the rare worker memoir, to try to get close to the mentality of protesters and revolutionaries. In the first two types of evidence, that effort involves a great deal of reading against the grain, with the understanding that the words of the insurgents are heavily filtered through the authorities. Would I like on-air interviews of my July Monarchy revolutionaries? Would I welcome immersion in their protests, catching stray comments as they rip up the paving stones? In a word: Yes. But such testimonies would not, or could not, stand alone without context or fact-checking; and such is also true for the material presented by RT.
What RT shows most clearly (and perversely) is that the power of video is deceptive. There is, to be sure, a hypnotic quality to the livestream, in no small part because of the suspense of the unscripted reality. One Saturday early in the protests, from my home in Hamilton, New York, I turned on the Ruptly live stream (now simply labeled as RT) and watched the CRS police run into a metro stop, past astonished commuters, going deeper and deeper underground. The end was an anticlimax: they merely arrested somebody. But the jolt of excitement was real; I was sitting in front of a computer, but I felt myself to be part of a major ongoing event. And like everyone watching the live feed, I wasn’t seeing the rest of Paris, a city of about 2.5 million, where most people were simply going about their ordinary Saturday business.
Maxime Audinet, a Russia specialist at the French Institute of International Relations, has spoken out about the nature of the propaganda put out by RT: “The ‘soft power’ [sic] practiced by Russia with RT isn’t to make [Russia] look more attractive to the West, but to delegitimize liberal democracies by overmediatizing the divisions in their societies”–thus the extended coverage by RT of even the smallest protest, and the hyperextended coverage of the Gilets Jaunes (Le Monde, January 5, 2019; see also a more extended interview with Audinet in L’Express, January 10, 2019).
Watch with caution.
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Header image from Shutterstock.com; an image of Vitry-sur-Seine, a suburb with a mixture of social classes and an investment in art education that is home to striking street art.
