How the power of ridicule has again become a feared weapon in French protest politics

TheThe idea that the protests over pension reforms in France would run out of steam has proven ill-founded. President Emmanuel Macron, who addressed the nation on April 17th, and his government had hoped that the protests would quieten down, and announced plans to restore a sense of calm to the country within 100 days. But in vain. After dozens of demonstrations against the reforms that were as full of discontent as they were huge, a sense of melancholy, fatalism and resignation initially threatened the social movement. However, it has now found a new lease of life – through mockery.

It has since proved impossible for Emmanuel Macron and his lesser imitators in government to visit anywhere in the country without provoking a concert of pots and pans, being pursued in the forest (as happened to the minister for ecology transition Christophe Béchu) or being subjected to “energy restraints” (the term used by activists for power cuts). Social media has completed this belittling process by ridiculing the ban issued by some local prefects on what they call “portable sound devices” - pots and pans to the rest of us – and by immortalising the smallest humiliation inflicted on Macron and his circle.

The electricity generator that was spotted during President Macron's visit to Vendôme, south of Paris, as a guard against power cuts carried out by trade unionists, has now become a symbol of the head of state's own impotence. Across the country, irony is getting under the government's skin. In adopting this approach the social protest movement has rediscovered a political weapon which has already proven effective in the past.

Laughing in the face of the government

The last king to reign in France, Louis-Philippe (1830 to 1848), was endlessly caricatured as a pear during 18 years and never fully found grounds to censor it. “What led to his collapse was press satire, which ridiculed him everywhere in an symbolic attack on power,” explains Matthieu Letourneux, professor of literature at Paris Nanterre University and co-editor of the book L’Empire du rire XIXe – XXIe siècle ('The Empire of Laughter 19th - 21st centuries').

More recently, each time the current Fifth Republic (which dates from 1958) has reverted to a more authoritarian and repressive conception of the state, this has revived the tradition of satirical mockery. In 1968 Gaullism was brought down as much by the hostile humour inherited from the international group the Situationist International as by revolutionary violence. The writer Serge Quadruppani demonstrated this in his recent autobiography Une histoire personnelle de l’ultragauche ('A personal history of the far-left') in which he refers to the famous photograph of young protester and future green politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit laughing in the face of an officer from the riot police. “Entire sections of the government can collapse at the first peal of laughter,” he writes. “In May [1968] laughing in the face of power, going to the streets, paid off.”

In Quartier rouge, an essay on the Left and pleasure, philosopher Michaël Fœssel also remarks upon the distinctive characteristic of that famously tumultuous year: “It was in 1968 that, for the last time, pleasure established itself as a reason for collective protest.”

There is thus a good reason for the return of these carnival-style actions. “The more the government seems entrenched, uptight and deaf, the more effective derision is at putting it in a state of crisis,” says Matthieu Letourneux. “It's a very old culture, which tells us something about the times, the era: as social dialogue, that of demonstrations, isn't working, you move on to another form of interaction, which is mocking the government.”

If Emmanuel Macron and his ministers initially thought they could brush aside these unwelcome happenings by dismissing them as the actions of a minority, they now look upon this mockery with greater concern. “It's not funny, it's serious,” said one minister quoted by the website Politico, after the education minister Pap Ndiaye was briefly blocked inside a train by demonstrators at the station at Lyon in south-east France on April 24th.

The unnamed minister has a point: for while symbolic, such actions are far from harmless. “Derision allows you to adopt a guerilla mindset: it's very targeted and attacks the government symbolically at its very core which, paradoxically, makes it more violent than a demonstration. It is aggression that is defused by the very gesture of humour. That's why we are at a crucial moment: laughter isn't childish, it's also political action,” says Matthieu Letourneux. Laughter is even more effective, faced with a weakened government, when the public finds it hard to defend the police repression that is being cheerfully.

Performative protest

After repression reached a peak at the protests over irrigation reservoirs at Sainte-Soline in west France, the social movement against pension reform has not been the only one to have started to place more emphasis on mockery (even if derision had already been part of the protest marches). On April 24th protestors against the new A69 Toulouse-Castres motorway in south-west France swapped their banners for trowels and built a wall across the middle of the tarmac. The activists also organised a soapbox car contest along the lines of an environmentally-friendly 'Mario Kart' race.

Simply carrying out these actions achieves their objective, whether this is forcing a minister to be exfiltrated by a police escort or cancelling an official visit, or by heralding – in a small-scale and temporary way – a different form of society.

The essayist and militant eco-socialist Corinne Morel Darleux says that this updating of protest methods is no small matter. It is explained first of all by a “democratic loosening”, she says. “Where in the past one might hope to be listened to by a government on the basis of a balance of power, that's no longer the case. We saw that with the 'yellow vests', the climate marches and the Affair of the Century [editor's note, action over climate change],” she says. “That produces a feeling of dejection, failure and stalemate, with the only response being repression, as we saw over pensions and over Sainte-Soline.”

Since then, the protest strategies have moved from making demands to a more “performative” approach, in other words “actions and struggles whose demands are achieved through the act of carrying them out”.

That is why, says the essayist, the traditional Left struggles to come across as a positive outlet for these political combats, despite all its attempts to support them. “The centre of gravity of political action is moving away from parties and unions towards more organic movements such as [the environmental protest group] Les Soulèvements de la Terre,” explains Corinne Morel Darleux. “They don't have a centralised system and they carry out actions which, on top of the aspects of communications, demands and symbolism, herald the way in which one might live differently.”

This is why even though they may be limited in duration and place, such protests can have a major effect.

In the meantime, these types of action provide people with the satisfaction of making an immediate impact on the world, through a mocking relationship with the government. “They take root through the act of doing, through the idea of directly affecting the substance of the world, something which responds to an absolute need to counter an alarming and very locked down world with joy,” suggests Romain Huët, a lecturer in communication sciences and author of the book De si violentes fatigues. Les devenirs politiques de l’épuisement quotidien ('From such violent fatigue. The political future of daily exhaustion') published in 2021.

“The pleasure lies in the fact that the movement is mixed, and also in the feeling of disrupting the course of events a little. That takes away our customary feeling of powerlessness,” he says.

This determination to act together in a playful way is also explained by the “vitalist” nature of the current struggles that are coalescing at the moment, whether they relate to climate change or work-related issues. “For the first time the demonstrators are not fighting against a technical measure that adjusts our life, but towards trying out ways of life that are qualitatively different, by questioning the role of work in our lives, something which is unprecedented,” says Romain Huët.

Escaping political powerlessness

The different forms of protest that have followed the movement against pension reform have shown, he says, a “determination to have a more streamlined life, less subject to the diktats of work, which in terms of quality is very often judged to be completely degrading”. The academic adds: “Work isn't being rejected. What's being rejected is work that offends and demeans.” To resist that through laughter, play and joy thus makes even more sense.

In the longer term this creative revival and its spontaneous appropriation of the public arena can, along with actions such as strikes and unofficial demonstrations, destabilise the government. In his latest essay L'Inexploré ('The Unexplored') the philosopher Baptiste Morizot calls on us to take seriously the emancipatory potential of what he calls “concrete struggles”. Writing of the successful campaign to block a new airport near Nantes in the west of France, he states: “In my view that is the decisive emotional impact of the ZAD [editor's note, protest camp] at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (which didn't change the world): it shows us the possible. Show us what's possible, a taste of what's possible, and you have a world that you feel you can change.”

Indeed, therein lies the political usefulness of laughter, even when everything seems hopeless: by revealing the absurdity of formal power, it inflicts a first defeat upon it.

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter