On a weekday evening, in between coronavirus lockdowns and curfews, Camille, Natacha and Cindy are out with a bright yellow plastic bucket of glue, two large brushes and a wad of A4 paper, each sheet covered with a single letter, reports The Guardian.
The women, all in their 20s, stop on the main road of this Paris suburb by the wall of what looks like a former bank.
“This is good,” says Camille. It is the signal for a well-practised piece of choreography: Natacha glues; Camille slaps up each lettered sheet; Cindy pastes over it.
They stand back. The message, in black letters on white paper, is clear: “Stop au harcelement de rue” (stop street harassment).
Another wall, another message. Outside the municipal swimming pool it’s paste, slap, paste: “Le consentement n’est pas une option” (consent isn’t optional). On a kiosk under the awnings of the local market, paste, slap, paste: “Stop féminicide”.
Then it is up and out of there to avoid a 68-euro fine if caught by the police. Another successful, albeit illegal, hit-and-run poster pasting.
For the past two years, similar messages have been appearing on walls all over Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Poitiers, Lyons and other French cities. They are the work of Les Colleuses – the gluers – feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard.
Camille Lextray became a colleuse after the particularly brutal murder of a young woman in September 2019 . Her partner denies her murder.
“Her name was Salomé and she was only 21 when she was beaten to death. The police had been called but they treated it as a domestic and did nothing. Later, they found her body under a pile of rubbish. We put up a collage on the anniversary of her death at the request of her mother,” Lextray said.
The idea for street posters to highlight cases of femicide was dreamed up by Marguerite Stern, a former member of the feminist activist group FEMEN. Stern, then living in Marseille, was deeply shocked by the 2019 killing of Julie Douib, 34, a mother of two children, shot dead at her home by an abusive ex-partner who goes on trial in June and denies her murder.
Douib had reported the man to the police five times before her death, but no action was taken. Stern began putting up posters denouncing violence against women in Marseille, later moving to Paris where she set up a collage collective.
In the early days they were called “Collages Contre les Féminicides” (collages against femicide), with groups pasting up the names of women killed by their current or former partner. The street action caught the imagination of women everywhere and spread even beyond France.
“Suddenly we had people all over the place contacting us.” says Camille. “At the last count more than 200 cities, towns and villages in France had collage groups others in London and in more than 15 countries around the world.”