A few days before Pentecost weekend, activists from a pro-life association carried out an original communication operation in the streets of Paris: they adorned the thousands of freely accessible bicycles in the city with a sticker celebrating life and childhood. Their gesture did not go unnoticed.
On the night of May 24th-25th between 11:30 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., activists from the Les Survivants (The Survivors) association criss-crossed the streets of Paris in groups of three and divided into sectors with a very specific objective: to cover the back of the ‘Vélib’—the free-access bicycles chartered by the Paris municipality—with a colourful sticker showing an embryo becoming a cute baby and then a small child on a bicycle, with the slogan: “What if you had let it live?”
The following morning, Parisians discovered more than 1,300 bikes customised in this way all over the city.
The organisation Les Survivants openly assumes responsibility, with its website address clearly visible on the stickers. On the website, a press release explained this militant action:
Remember the first time when—hearts pounding, stomachs in knots—we had to lift our little child’s feet off the ground to take our first pedal turn, then the second, and finally gain enough speed to keep our balance? You who ride this Vélib, don’t you remember all those times when, as a child learning to ride a bike, you dared to go on an adventure? Adventure is what life is all about: like a challenge, you meet the unexpected because zero risk remains a utopian dream. Let’s give every unborn child the chance to be happy.
In the opinion of users, the sticker was so well designed and so well adapted to the frame of the bicycles that many Parisians thought it was an official advertising campaign, and therefore accepted by Paris City Council—which did not fail to arouse the anger of feminist and pro-abortion associations, led by Family Parenthood, which denounced it as a “conservative” and “far-right” manoeuvre:
The company in charge of operating the bicycles and the Paris City Council intend to lodge a complaint against this gratuitous publicity stunt. Paris councillor Sylvain Raifaud said he was “devastated.” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo described the campaign as “a disgrace to our Republic, to Paris and its values.” The city council intends to take steps to ensure that this does not happen again—but the improvised nature of the night-time commandos makes it by definition difficult to combat.
The advertising campaign was daring and illegal, but fully endorsed by the association. “We are aware that it is perfectly illegal, but we feel that it is a necessary evil to make our voice and our message heard. Public space is monopolised by a single voice and we’d like to propose something different,” explains Alix, the Survivors’ representative.
Any public communication on the issue of life seems indeed impossible in the capital. In 2020, an advertising campaign by the Alliance Vita association—paid for and authorised by the Paris transport company’s advertising department—was withdrawn from stations and the metro at the request of the Paris City Council on the grounds that the slogans were “anti-abortion.” The offending posters read: “Society will only progress if we respect maternity,” “paternity” and “life”—words clearly deemed intolerable by the Socialist mayor’s office.
