But what is “this,” exactly? Everyone has a theory, and understandably so: We have to try to make sense of the chaos, to distinguish between political symbolism and senseless frenzy, and understand why the city hall in Limoges went up in flames, why the one in Marseille was stormed like the Capitol on January 6, why masked men dressed in black are running around with French flags, why others loot stores, pelt police with stones, and applaud the firefighters who come to put out the fires they started.
The Insurrection as Postcard
On the stage that is the street, incompatible genres overlap. On one side, a Ken Loach film: nurses, teachers, students, Yellow Vest protesters—the France that counts what it has left at the end of the month and knows it doesn’t amount to much. On the other, an action movie somewhere between The Stronghold and Athena, mixed with a GTA-style video game: masked figures, store windows kicked in, looting, and car chases. Some march with their faces uncovered, making their distress visible as they try to build a society together; others anonymously defy the authorities and indulge in the easy thrills of stealthy theft.
But they don’t just steal sneakers, clothes, or flat-screen TVs. By producing images that are impossible to forget, by commandeering people’s attention, they also strip protesters of their only real asset: visibility. By occupying the same streets, they deprive the protesters of their narrative. Everything gets jumbled together. It’s spectacular and chaotic, like a big-budget movie without a director, where all the extras have gone mad, where a runaway AI has been given an anarchist prompt: “Show me a protest that combines all the available protest footage from the last 10 years.” It’s all there: Palestinian flags, yellow vests, even surgical masks, which we so desperately lacked during the COVID pandemic and which are now part of the essential gear of seasoned protesters, protecting against both cameras and tear gas. That’s where the chaos begins, in this collision of irreconcilable languages, where everyone claims to speak on behalf of everyone else. It’s the Republic of Babel, a sort of Netflix of social reality in multiplex form, where competing fictions play side by side in parallel worlds.
You can imagine the tourists’ dismay. They were hoping to see the lights of Paris, only to find the lights of the fires instead. They dreamed of a romantic comedy, of living out Emily in Paris, but instead they are plunged into anarchy in Paris. They wanted, like the pope, to visit the restored splendors of Notre-Dame, and instead find themselves in an immersive version of Les Misérables—one that’s a little too realistic.