“No, no, don’t come to Nice. I will come meet you in Monte Carlo. Nice is foutu,” messaged a French friend to me on the eve of Bastille Day, or, as it is officially known in France, “La Fête Nationale.” My friend wanted to spare me the challenges of a French city still profoundly affected by nationwide riots ongoing since June 27th, when a 17-year old boy of Algerian origin was fatally shot by the police in Nanterre after he sped away during a traffic stop. Since that incident, and in an eerie echo of demonstrations in the United States that were far from “mostly peaceful” after the death of George Floyd in 2020, angry French mobs have destroyed 6,000 cars, damaged 1,000 buildings, and committed actions resulting in at least 3,300 arrests. These latest disturbances followed mass protests earlier this year against proposed changes to France’s retirement age, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement against regressive taxation, deepening concerns about inequality, fear for the loss of France’s distinctive culture, and a suspicious pattern of fires that destroyed a number of historic French churches, including, in 2019, Paris’s iconic Notre Dame.
My friend’s instructions suited me, for I was on a boat moored in Monte Carlo’s surreally beautiful port—gently lolling between the retired Emir of Qatar’s sublime $400 million yacht and a more modest formerly Russian-owned yacht that was recently seized under war-related sanctions. From this vantage point of immense privilege, I faced but a short walk to meet her at a chic café. Though also short, her trip was far more arduous. Nice is only a brief train ride away from Monte Carlo, but transportation is unreliable these days, with the stress of recent events augmented by abnormally large crowds of tourists making up for travel time lost during the pandemic. She arrived after some delay due to a late train, and unexpected questioning by French authorities about why she was crossing a border that was barely noticed before. Over an excellent meal in Monaco, which is clean, peaceful, and prosperous, she regaled me with one horror story after another of what has become everyday life in a France divided (Monaco became a de facto French protectorate in 1918, but almost completely shed that status by 2002). Was she looking forward to Bastille Day, I asked her. “Mais pourquoi?” she dryly replied with no small hint of bitterness.
My friend’s apathy is well grounded in the realities of a country that has never really achieved the national unity that its ‘National Festival’ was created to celebrate, despite trying out a republican form of government in no fewer than five incarnations over the past 231 years. In the world beyond France, and often within Francophonie, it is often forgotten that July 14th is not merely a celebration of the capture in 1789 of the Bastille, the infamous fortress-turned-prison-turned-ammo-dump that hulked on what was then the fringe of Paris as a symbol of the oppressive power of the ancien régime. When the legislature of France’s Third Republic created the holiday in 1880, its more moderate members were consoled by the concession that they would not be celebrating the mob rule and decapitations of 1789, but the spirit of the now nearly forgotten Fête de la Fédération—the Federation Festival—which was held on the Champs de Mars, the future home of the Eiffel Tower, on July 14, 1790. Self-consciously planned to welcome what everyone hoped would be a functional constitutional monarchy, it was probably the last time in French history when all segments of society publicly expressed undisputed comity and a shared political purpose. King Louis XVI, then still on his throne, presided as that system’s constitutional monarch-in-waiting, but the master of ceremonies, who commanded from a white horse, was the Marquis de Lafayette—the ‘hero of two worlds’ who had made his name fighting on the side of the colonists in the American War of Independence.
The duality of the celebration made Bastille Day palatable to the broad spectrum of France’s body politic. The Left reveled in its spirit of rebellion. The Right honored its celebration of national pride and the valor of the armed forces. The fusion of national sentiment during the First World War strengthened the holiday by moving the military parade to Paris’s central avenue, the Champs-Élysées, where it has been held almost every year since. Even the reactionary right Action Française, which has enjoyed a recent rival after a century of authoritarian monarchism, today embraces the holiday because it celebrates the military and Louis XVI, who, AF tweeted this July 14th, “wanted to close the wound opened a year before.”
Hélas, nobody seems able to close that wound today. Emmanuel Macron, who entered office in 2017 spouting shallow Obamaesque pledges of healing and unity, has presided over a degradation of French political life unseen since the near-revolutionary conditions of 1968—which were themselves widely perceived as a continuation of France’s unrealized attempts to balance liberty and equality. Domestically, hardly anyone respects the French president, whose public approval rating hovers at around 30 percent. His initiatives rarely go anywhere. During this year’s parade down the Champs-Élysées, he was roundly booed by observers.
Indeed, despite the early comparisons to Obama, Macron seems more like a French version of Jimmy Carter, a hapless leader who created far more problems than he solved, and who sabotaged his presidency by correctly observing—coincidentally the morning after Bastille Day 1979—a “crisis of confidence” in a stagnant America that quickly adopted the apposite French word “malaise” to describe Carter’s sentiments. In the same vein, Macron has acknowledged his own disastrous leadership by speaking with self-incriminating frankness about what he calls France’s “décivilisation” under his presidency, a decay that his political enemies go only a slight step farther to deride as “ensauvagement.” Polls suggest that if the next presidential election were held now, Macron would be decisively defeated by Marine Le Pen, whose Rassemblement National, an updated incarnation of her father’s Front National, has successfully transformed itself from a far-right protest movement with no realistic chance of winning into a viable and popular alternative to the puppet candidates of the country’s failing and corrupt administrative-managerial caste. “What have you done with France?” Le Pen has credibly asked its current president, whom she may well succeed.
Celebrating the national day in these circumstances is far from easy, nor does it do much to alleviate concerns about Macron, whom observers across the political spectrum view at best as a spent force and at worst as a devastating liability for the future of France. To add to the Roman images of decline, this year the Nation thought it best to place a ban on fireworks sales in the days leading up to the holiday. Curiously for a country with comprehensive gun control laws, fireworks have long been readily available for purchase at low prices in shops and online, and they have been the rioters’ weapon of choice in the recent racial disturbances. Embarrassingly, indulgence in the holiday’s most iconic form of celebration has now become a security risk. Many municipalities dourly canceled their own fireworks displays for fear of enflaming the protests, leading people to wonder who is really in charge.
Meanwhile, as Macron sinks, alternatives are rising in popularity. Along with Le Pen and her party, the radical Left is flourishing amid open promises of a Sixth Republic to replace France’s constitutional order. To speak of “La France” instead of “La République” as an entity to be served and honored is mark of virtue. According to at least one poll, nearly half of Frenchmen would welcome the restoration of the monarchy in the person of the legitimist Bourbon pretender, the titular Louis XX, a charismatic public figure of France’s Generation X whose annual message this year called on all of his countrymen to unite and work for the common good. No one can know how or if France will emerge from its malaise, but back on the Riviera, the on-deck white party had embraced the color of the monarchist banner, which represents purity, rather than the tricouleur, which now seems to represent the empty promises of a failed experiment that has gone on for too long.
A Bleak Bastille Day Descends Upon France
“No, no, don’t come to Nice. I will come meet you in Monte Carlo. Nice is foutu,” messaged a French friend to me on the eve of Bastille Day, or, as it is officially known in France, “La Fête Nationale.” My friend wanted to spare me the challenges of a French city still profoundly affected by nationwide riots ongoing since June 27th, when a 17-year old boy of Algerian origin was fatally shot by the police in Nanterre after he sped away during a traffic stop. Since that incident, and in an eerie echo of demonstrations in the United States that were far from “mostly peaceful” after the death of George Floyd in 2020, angry French mobs have destroyed 6,000 cars, damaged 1,000 buildings, and committed actions resulting in at least 3,300 arrests. These latest disturbances followed mass protests earlier this year against proposed changes to France’s retirement age, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement against regressive taxation, deepening concerns about inequality, fear for the loss of France’s distinctive culture, and a suspicious pattern of fires that destroyed a number of historic French churches, including, in 2019, Paris’s iconic Notre Dame.
My friend’s instructions suited me, for I was on a boat moored in Monte Carlo’s surreally beautiful port—gently lolling between the retired Emir of Qatar’s sublime $400 million yacht and a more modest formerly Russian-owned yacht that was recently seized under war-related sanctions. From this vantage point of immense privilege, I faced but a short walk to meet her at a chic café. Though also short, her trip was far more arduous. Nice is only a brief train ride away from Monte Carlo, but transportation is unreliable these days, with the stress of recent events augmented by abnormally large crowds of tourists making up for travel time lost during the pandemic. She arrived after some delay due to a late train, and unexpected questioning by French authorities about why she was crossing a border that was barely noticed before. Over an excellent meal in Monaco, which is clean, peaceful, and prosperous, she regaled me with one horror story after another of what has become everyday life in a France divided (Monaco became a de facto French protectorate in 1918, but almost completely shed that status by 2002). Was she looking forward to Bastille Day, I asked her. “Mais pourquoi?” she dryly replied with no small hint of bitterness.
My friend’s apathy is well grounded in the realities of a country that has never really achieved the national unity that its ‘National Festival’ was created to celebrate, despite trying out a republican form of government in no fewer than five incarnations over the past 231 years. In the world beyond France, and often within Francophonie, it is often forgotten that July 14th is not merely a celebration of the capture in 1789 of the Bastille, the infamous fortress-turned-prison-turned-ammo-dump that hulked on what was then the fringe of Paris as a symbol of the oppressive power of the ancien régime. When the legislature of France’s Third Republic created the holiday in 1880, its more moderate members were consoled by the concession that they would not be celebrating the mob rule and decapitations of 1789, but the spirit of the now nearly forgotten Fête de la Fédération—the Federation Festival—which was held on the Champs de Mars, the future home of the Eiffel Tower, on July 14, 1790. Self-consciously planned to welcome what everyone hoped would be a functional constitutional monarchy, it was probably the last time in French history when all segments of society publicly expressed undisputed comity and a shared political purpose. King Louis XVI, then still on his throne, presided as that system’s constitutional monarch-in-waiting, but the master of ceremonies, who commanded from a white horse, was the Marquis de Lafayette—the ‘hero of two worlds’ who had made his name fighting on the side of the colonists in the American War of Independence.
The duality of the celebration made Bastille Day palatable to the broad spectrum of France’s body politic. The Left reveled in its spirit of rebellion. The Right honored its celebration of national pride and the valor of the armed forces. The fusion of national sentiment during the First World War strengthened the holiday by moving the military parade to Paris’s central avenue, the Champs-Élysées, where it has been held almost every year since. Even the reactionary right Action Française, which has enjoyed a recent rival after a century of authoritarian monarchism, today embraces the holiday because it celebrates the military and Louis XVI, who, AF tweeted this July 14th, “wanted to close the wound opened a year before.”
Hélas, nobody seems able to close that wound today. Emmanuel Macron, who entered office in 2017 spouting shallow Obamaesque pledges of healing and unity, has presided over a degradation of French political life unseen since the near-revolutionary conditions of 1968—which were themselves widely perceived as a continuation of France’s unrealized attempts to balance liberty and equality. Domestically, hardly anyone respects the French president, whose public approval rating hovers at around 30 percent. His initiatives rarely go anywhere. During this year’s parade down the Champs-Élysées, he was roundly booed by observers.
Indeed, despite the early comparisons to Obama, Macron seems more like a French version of Jimmy Carter, a hapless leader who created far more problems than he solved, and who sabotaged his presidency by correctly observing—coincidentally the morning after Bastille Day 1979—a “crisis of confidence” in a stagnant America that quickly adopted the apposite French word “malaise” to describe Carter’s sentiments. In the same vein, Macron has acknowledged his own disastrous leadership by speaking with self-incriminating frankness about what he calls France’s “décivilisation” under his presidency, a decay that his political enemies go only a slight step farther to deride as “ensauvagement.” Polls suggest that if the next presidential election were held now, Macron would be decisively defeated by Marine Le Pen, whose Rassemblement National, an updated incarnation of her father’s Front National, has successfully transformed itself from a far-right protest movement with no realistic chance of winning into a viable and popular alternative to the puppet candidates of the country’s failing and corrupt administrative-managerial caste. “What have you done with France?” Le Pen has credibly asked its current president, whom she may well succeed.
Celebrating the national day in these circumstances is far from easy, nor does it do much to alleviate concerns about Macron, whom observers across the political spectrum view at best as a spent force and at worst as a devastating liability for the future of France. To add to the Roman images of decline, this year the Nation thought it best to place a ban on fireworks sales in the days leading up to the holiday. Curiously for a country with comprehensive gun control laws, fireworks have long been readily available for purchase at low prices in shops and online, and they have been the rioters’ weapon of choice in the recent racial disturbances. Embarrassingly, indulgence in the holiday’s most iconic form of celebration has now become a security risk. Many municipalities dourly canceled their own fireworks displays for fear of enflaming the protests, leading people to wonder who is really in charge.
Meanwhile, as Macron sinks, alternatives are rising in popularity. Along with Le Pen and her party, the radical Left is flourishing amid open promises of a Sixth Republic to replace France’s constitutional order. To speak of “La France” instead of “La République” as an entity to be served and honored is mark of virtue. According to at least one poll, nearly half of Frenchmen would welcome the restoration of the monarchy in the person of the legitimist Bourbon pretender, the titular Louis XX, a charismatic public figure of France’s Generation X whose annual message this year called on all of his countrymen to unite and work for the common good. No one can know how or if France will emerge from its malaise, but back on the Riviera, the on-deck white party had embraced the color of the monarchist banner, which represents purity, rather than the tricouleur, which now seems to represent the empty promises of a failed experiment that has gone on for too long.
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