Report on Paris / anti-pension reform demos (LR)

In Paris for the past few weeks against the retirement reforms, I’ve gotten the impression of this shared sense of collective powerlessness. Usually the normal and depressing individual sense of being powerless disappears for a while in the big demo. But for this cycle of demos, I’ve felt this individual sense just reflected from all sides. Everyone I’m around has been talking about this problem. There’s nothing new here, but the experience was still strange.

The first march in mid-January was the biggest in Paris for more than 20 years, and there were literally too many people to start the demo, so the parcours ended up splitting in two directions. At first we had this amazing sense of really taking over part of the city, but after a while we lost track of where the different corteges were. We made it to a big roundabout, where thousands of people were standing around, cold, waiting quietly for the union processions to catch up from several directions. The silence at this roundabout was striking after the loud confusion on the boulevards. But all of it really was confused. I think everyone was just as surprised as everyone else about the silence, a kind of strange mutual or general recognition of how inadequate the situation was. It was understandable, there was none of the fun of other demos, and it was really cold. It was as if we were all there just out of a somber responsibility, to be counted, or to be witness to something. I thought later of Benjamin and Baudelaire and big cities and how we are often spared experiences instead of properly denied them. The city spared us a fun demo, and even a fleeting sense of effectiveness that day and since. The sad thing is that the city and this world have rarely felt more permanent to me than that first demo when they were partly interrupted by this massive crowd that was too big to imagine what it could do with itself. A friend has been telling me about entropy and disorder since then. 

When I think of that mass too big for itself, I waver between the two silly and tired positions of thinking about what I did, what I could do, and about “organization” (not too much though). I don’t want to think of this! I want the mass to disappear my sense of powerlessness for a while. It’s been a bit demoralizing to go through every week with everyone a new proof of collective unimaginativeness, and it does make everyone turn inward a bit. Enthusiasm and energy are always pushed back, to the date of an unlimited strike, or when the government will invoke some special procedures to force through the law. 

(LR)