(The Gilets Jaunes in Paris)
It was an evening sometime in the summer or early fall of
1973, and my brother John and I were sitting in a café in the Left Bank of
Paris near Sorbonne University. Drinking our beers, perhaps an aperitif or two,
we were enjoying ourselves by our window table when all of a sudden total chaos
broke out in the streets outside.
Hundreds of students carrying placards and crudely written
signs, shouting, their faces alive with emotion, rushed past us. Many of them
looked back as they ran, and we soon saw why. Hot on their trail were equally
hundreds of uniformed police waving their black sticks with intent to use them.
My brother and I weren’t sure how to react so we watched as
the crowds disappeared into the narrow streets and alleys of the Latin Quarter.
It was just a few years after the major protests of 1968, and I remember seeing
huge signs in the streets announcing news of the latest arrests of members of
the revolutionary Baader-Meinhof gang, the popular name of Germany’s Red Army
Faction led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Both were in jail by that
time, but key faction members were still on the loose planting bombs,
kidnapping politicians and generally wreaking havoc.
I’ve been thinking about that visit to Paris during the
recent protests by the gilets jaunes—Yellow Vests—in the streets of Paris and
elsewhere across France, a movement of the French working class in defiance of
the country’s neo-liberal president Emmanuel Macron and his policies of giant
tax breaks to the rich and corporations while hiking taxes on workers and
cutting public services.
With even major labor leaders looking askance at their
protests, the Yellow Vests don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. Theirs is
a spontaneous protest prompted in part by Macron’s hike on fuel, which has
caused a divide with environmentalists. To the protesters, that hike was the
straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back because it made their already
struggling lives even more of a struggle. French workers usually live outside
the cities and have to commute. After cutting their public transportation,
Macron wanted to raise their already expensive fuel prices.
The protests were so vehement that Macron had to back off
his fuel tax plan, but people remained in the streets because their issues went
far beyond the cost of keeping the tanks in their vehicles full. Called the
“yellow vests” because of the piece of safety clothing French drivers are
required to keep in their cars, these French workers are actually part of a
much larger and hopefully growing protest against the neo-liberal corporate
takeover of this world that major political parties of all stripes in most
countries have come to accept.
The U.S. media haven’t paid much attention what’s going on
in the streets of Paris. Leftist media have done some admirable work, but what you’re
more likely to encounter are articles such as Alexander Hurst’s “The Ugly,
Illiberal, Anti-Semitic Heart of the Yellow Vest Movement” that appeared last
month in New Republic magazine, a
publication that has veered left and right over its long history and as this
article indicates seems content to side with the self-satisfied liberal elite
who call themselves socially liberal but are anything but on anything else.
Hurst’s article wages war on casseurs (“smashers”) who have
joined the Yellow Vests at times and contributed violence to confrontations
with the police—sort of like identifying all leftist critics of capitalism with
the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s!
Macron won election in France due largely to the failure of
major parties to field candidates who could truly address the concerns of the
French people. The same phenomenon happened in the United States, and that’s
why we have Donald Trump as president. Demagogues and self-proclaimed saviors
thrive in a political vacuum. The same phenomenon occurred more than a century
ago in the United States and led to the creation of the People’s Party, also
known as the Populists, the largest and most significant third party movement
in the history of our nation.
(To the right, Emiliano Zapata in 1912)
The other night on Turner Classic Movies I watched the 1952
film “Viva Zapata!”, the story of the great turn-of-the-last-century Mexican
peasant-turned-revolutionary whose legacy as a leader and champion of the
people lives on today. Directed by Elia Kazan with a script by John Steinbeck and
starring Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata, the film showed how revolutionaries like
Zapata in the south of Mexico and Pancho Villa to the north filled a vacuum in
that country. After their revolution produced results, the weak-kneed Francisco
Madero took over the country, thinking he could accommodate the crying needs of
the people while still dealing with bullying militarists like Victoriano
Huerta. He paid for that mistake with his life, and so did Zapata and Villa.
Do the Gilets Jaunes need a strong leader, a Zapata, to keep
their movement alive and well? France has a long and inspiring history of
social movements that sprang up from the people—beginning in modern history
with the French Revolution and including other inspiring moments in history
such as the Paris Communards of 1871. True leaders who never lose sight of the
cause, such as Zapata, are rare.
In the film “Viva Zapata!” one of the generals makes a
remark about the revolution breaking out in his country. “Ideas are harder to
kill than snakes. How do you kill an idea?” Brando’s Zapata points to another
truth about people’s movements. “A strong people is the only lasting strength.”
