The final adoption of the law on pensions, validated by the Constitutional Council, has in no way helped calm the social climate in France. For several days, the head of state Emmanuel Macron and his ministers have been confronted by a wave of demonstrations and heckling during their trips across the country.
Concerts of pots and pans, or ‘casserolades’ in French, have been heard throughout France as a sign of protest. The start signal came during Emmanuel Macron’s televised address on Monday evening, April 17th, with the aim of drowning out the voice of the president, who is being criticised for not listening to the French. Since then, the noisy demonstrations have continued almost non-stop.
On April 19th, Emmanuel Macron’s first trip outside Paris—to Alsace on the border with Germany—gave rise to very tense exchanges between the president and the demonstrators who came to welcome him. The president, reacting to the noise caused by his presence, retorted that “it was not the pots and pans that would make France move forward.”
On all his trips, the same scenario has been repeated, as in Vendôme in the west, near Orléans, a few days later. The local prefect had set up a ‘security perimeter’ to avoid any contact between the president and the demonstrators. He angered—and amused—many French people by banning “sound-amplifying devices”—an elegant administrative term for pans. Several associations, however, obtained the lifting of this prefectorial order from the administrative court.
The tradition of casserolades is not new in France. They were common during the reign of King Louis-Philippe in the 1830s when very selective suffrage deprived a large majority of the French population of any political expression. The pans were then understood as the voice of the voiceless. Today, public opinion often compares Emmanuel Macron to this bourgeois king who was also castigated for his contempt for the people.
But Emmanuel Macron is not the only one to be greeted with the sound of pans when he travels. All his ministers, one after the other, have also had that painful experience. On Monday, April 24th, Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye on a trip to Lyon had to postpone his visit to an institute for teachers due to the presence of demonstrators. He was then blocked at the train station on his return to the capital, as hundreds of demonstrators were waiting for him in the station hall with saucepans in hand. The ministers Gabriel Attal and Stanislas Guerini, on a trip to the Hérault department in the south of France, were also treated to a concert of pans on Tuesday, April 25th.
During his televised address, Emmanuel Macron had promised a new start for the government led by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, for a period of “one hundred days.” For the moment, the promised renewal has all the appearance of a dead end.
