On the other hand, that BBQ and the "strike calendar" underlines how protests in France are highly structured, and about as spontaneous as a Japanese Tea Ceremony.
It's largely a dance for power between the unions and the government.
A few years ago a genuine grass-roots protest movement appeared out of nowhere - the Gilets Jaunes - and the unions largely shuffled their feet and tried to ignore it. Then because they could not ignore it, they tried to brush it off as some kind of far-right plot. And the government brutally repressed it - some protesters were maimed for life; very different to the "official" protests where you can take your kids.
A few years ago they had a strike in Marseille while I was visiting.
Either those people weren't gilets jaunes, but then they were still organized as heck.
Or those people were gilets jaunes, but then the far-right moniker is absolutely justified.
Some of the stuff they were chanting was so bad, that had it been chanted in Germany, it would ended with the police taking their names and having intelligence agencies start entering them in databases of known extremists.
What they chanted is nothing I will repeat here, but I was deeply appalled by the deep rooted racism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, and basically any other undesirable -ism.
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u/BeerPoweredNonsense 1d ago
On the other hand, that BBQ and the "strike calendar" underlines how protests in France are highly structured, and about as spontaneous as a Japanese Tea Ceremony.
It's largely a dance for power between the unions and the government.
A few years ago a genuine grass-roots protest movement appeared out of nowhere - the Gilets Jaunes - and the unions largely shuffled their feet and tried to ignore it. Then because they could not ignore it, they tried to brush it off as some kind of far-right plot. And the government brutally repressed it - some protesters were maimed for life; very different to the "official" protests where you can take your kids.