May Day 2019: Infox and the Attack (or the “Attack”) on La Pitié-Salpêtrière

The posters are brave, cheery, a little wrinkled: “Together to build the future.” Not this year.

Traditionally May Day is dominated by workers and their unions, all of them, like the large Confédération générale du travail (CGT), founded in the late nineteenth century, using it as a show of strength. But the preceding Act Twenty-Something of the Gilets Jaunes on Saturday, April 26, had mustered fewer than 20,000 marchers, and as everyone suspected and predicted, the Gilets Jaunes had simply moved their activities for the week to Wednesday, May 1.

May Day.

An estimated forty thousand were in Paris, including union demonstrators (the CGT, in red vests and accompanied by a big balloon), the Gilets Jaunes, and the Black Blocs, as this montage below indicates.

(The man with the baby in the stroller is a visual touch that Fellini might have envied.)

The story that came out of the day’s events was not about the violence and property damage (repetition has inured the public), the black blocs (almost always there) or the sudden rescue of the CGT leader, Philippe Martinez, from a cloud of teargas occasioned by a charge of the black blocs. (He blamed the police.) The story that dominated, instead, was about the “attack” on La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital complex. The unit allegedly targeted was the service de réanimation, which translates (thankfully) as intensive care unit.

Christophe Castaner, the Minister of the Interior who has been criticized for his handling of the protests, announced both on television and in a tweet that the hospital had been “attacked.”

One of those inside the hospital filmed the entire episode. The video appeared on facebook and Youtube almost immediately, and seemed to contradict the notion of a deliberate attack. Ouest-france also posted the video, noting the grey hair (code for unthreatening) of one of the “assailants,” who pleaded that they were merely trying to get away from the police.

Judging by this video, there were about two and a half minutes of fear; then the hospital personnel spoke to one of the men (it seems to be Jacques, below), the police came, and it was over. On the following day, Le Monde published an investigative reconstruction of the events leading up to the flight into the hospital courtyard. They concluded that no one had deliberately attacked the hospital itself. Nevertheless, at least two people in black seem to have climbed over the grilles and opened them, as the crowd forced its way in.

Finally, on May 3, Castaner issued an apology for stating that the Gilets Jaunes had attacked the hospital, suggesting that he had reacted to the emotions of those he had talked to on the scene.

One would imagine that statement of apology and correction would have ended it.

One would be wrong.

There were denunciations and public calls for his resignation, from the far left (La France Insoumise and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon,) to the Far Right. The National Rally party had been calling for Castaner’s resignation for weeks, and Jordan Bardella, head of the list of the RN’s European electoral slate, called for it once again, as well as engaging in the party’s own traditional way of celebrating May Day by bringing flowers to a statue of Joan of Arc.

Le Figaro identified a number of political figures who had called for Castaner’s resignation on the basis of this “lie,” including some from Les Républicains (LRs).  Aside from other members of the government, including the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, the only prominent political figure who put this episode into some kind of perspective was Valérie Pécresse (LR), president of the Île-de-France region, who acknowledged that Castaner had “overreacted,” but added, “What justifies an intrusion into a public hospital?  The intention doesn’t matter! . . . What sorts of damage might they have been able to carry out if they had been able to enter the ICU? . . . The hospital is a sanctuary, and should be respected by the demonstrators.”

Jacques Leleu, age 67. one of those arrested at the hospital, emerged from jail, where he had been held for a over a day, and stated that he would bring charges:

(BFMTV is regarded as the Fox TV of Macron and the elites.)

Two members of the Communist Party (PCF), one a Senator, Pierre Ouzoulias, and MEP Marie Pierre Vieu, actually lodged a complaint. They immediately brought Castaner’s tweet to the attention of the Tribunal de Grande Instance for violation of the new infox law (Le Monde).

So what is infox? A brief digression is in order.

Concerned that the term “fake news” was making itself at home in French popular usage, La Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française, in existence since February 2019 under the Ministry of Culture, proposed the term “infox” instead and advised its use in administrative documents. Le Monde reported that the word came from the combination of “information” and “intox,” or a kind of brainwashing.  However dubious that is as an origin story, the word itself is elegant; it is defined as deliberately false statements designed to discredit a political party, sully the reputation of a person or enterprise, or contradict an established scientific fact.  It certainly is a great deal better than gefälschte nachrichten.

Infox. Infox and friends.

The law on fausse information (so called only because it was pre-infox) was passed on November 20, 2018, by the National Assembly (Le Monde).  The law applies to the periods of three months before certain elections (presidential, legislative, senatorial, and European) and allows a party to refer a source to prosecution (within 48 hours) for spreading fake news.

Senator Ouzoulias, who brought the charge against Castaner, recalled that the law had been presented to the Senate as a means to prevent Russian interference in the coming elections, and he wanted to underline the point that “interference can come from elsewhere.”  In addition he wanted to demonstrate that the law was at best absurd, “at worst, liberticide” (Le Monde).  The case against Castaner was thrown out on May 17, on the grounds that Castaner had “exaggerated” but had based his exaggeration on real facts, not made-up facts (Le Monde). The Conseil Constitutionnel, the highest administrative body for determining constitutionality, had already ruled the law constitutional on December 20, 2018, and had explicitly excluded a number of forms of speech, including opinions, parodies, partial truths, or “simple exaggerations” (Le Monde).

Gérard Collomb, mayor of Lyon and previous Minister of the Interior under Macron, suggested that Castaner should perhaps refrain from excessive talking and tweeting.  “One is not obliged, when one is Minister of the Interior, to communicate every day,” Collomb said, adding that “if you make an unsupported observation, that reinforces the gilets jaunes tendency” (i.e., mistrust of government).

Perhaps Castaner will slow down the tweets, though there is little evidence of that so far. Undoubtedly Castaner might wish to take back his appearance on Au Tableau!, a half hour weekly series in which children ask questions of leading political and entertainment figures.  Castaner appeared in late February, 2019, in the midst of ongoing Gilets Jaunes protests, and attempted an ill-advised explanation of the controversal “flashball,” the name commonly given to the gun that shoots rubber projectiles, the use of which has been internationally contested.  The child Melchior began the segment by asking him where on the body “the police have the right to shoot the flashball” (he corrected flashball to LBD, lanceur des balles de défense), and it went downhill from there.

But as is often the case, the otherwise overblown controversy has deeper roots: it had happened before.

In June 2016, under the Hollande presidency,  France was still under a state of emergency because of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist attacks at the beginning and end of 2015, and with the Bastille Day Nice truck attack still to come.  Hollande attempted to pass an unpopular labor law, and the unions called for a demonstration. Some of the scenes of this demonstration were captured below:

The meaning of this attack on the Necker Children’s Hospital, and the attempts by the government and the press to use it, were skillfully analyzed at the time in The Funambulist.  In brief, the author Léopold Lambert argued that the authorities shaped their coverage of the day around this one event, a small part of the overall protest, in order to deflect attention from the basic inequities brought to the surface by the proposed changes in the conditions of labor.  Videos of the scene later revealed that at most three casseurs were involved, and in the background one could hear another demonstrator shouting at them to stop, because it was a children’s hospital.  

This article, however, also suggests two possible reactions to the incident of La Pitié-Salpêtrière.

From Castaner’s point of view, a deliberate attack on a hospital during a protest is not unheard of.

From the point of view of those who considered Castaner’s statement a deliberate lie, it was an effort to politicize the attempted intrusion, as the previous government had done.

What was on clear display in this media controversy, however, was that the press and to a large extent the politicians have treated the Gilets Jaunes differently, as somehow more justified, more righteous, than other protesters.  Why the rush to excuse them, to speak of violence and property destruction as something always “on the margins” of the demonstrations, and done by someone else? (And it’s not, I think, simply because the Gilets Jaunes are overwhelmingly white; though it’s partly that.).

But the continuing reality, as this May Day episode shows, is that many politicians and journalists, in speaking of the Gilets Jaunes, sound very much like their counterparts of the Year II (1793-94), who constantly praised the virtues and wisdom of “the Good People of Paris,” of whom they were terrified.  

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