Tag Archives: gilets jaunes
Up for judgment: Macron’s Great Debate, and the ‘re-looking’ of the Champs Elysees.
Part 1 It is desperately unfashionable to spare a good word for President Emmanuel Macron. You may call him elitist, aloof, politically deaf and dumb, an imperious windbag or vacillating introvert, a conservative in progressive clothing or vice-versa, or all of the above. Just don’t give him any credit. The current global nationalist/populist movements have […]
Sing along if you can remember: Oh! Oh! Les Champs-Elysées…
‘What’s gone so wrong with France suddenly? What’s the story with the Yellow Vests?’ Outside of La Hexagone I’m pelted with such questions, as if coming from Paris confers some sort of special insight. It doesn’t. After five months of increasingly violent protest, no one, including the actors themselves, really knows where the roots of […]
The Drama of The Yellow Vests: Act Four
Those talking heads who say they saw the insurrection coming? – in this amplitude, in this form? are lying. Or, at best, kidding themselves. A few facts, as the rain and the sanitation trucks collaborate to try to clean the trashed streets of Paris: Yesterday didn’t quite add up to the apocalypse that some, including […]
Back with a Vengeance?
Congratulations if you are already aware that the storming of the Bastille in July, 1789, was not the beginning of the French Republic. (Turns out that launch wasn’t until 1792, and it didn’t last long.) The storming of the nearly empty prison, by a crowd of less than a thousand, had mainly symbolic weight […]
POINT de VUE: PARIS 
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