In January and February, and even the first week of March, we saw the biggest demonstrations in decades every week. However, these marches were totally reliant on the union calendar of strike days. The second week of March, however, piled up many different days of action, with a strike on Tuesday the 7th, International Women’s Day on Wednesday, a student day of mobilization on Thursday, a climate protest on Friday, and a France Insoumise march on Saturday.
This was an important week for the movement even outside of the demonstrations, because several sectors decided to extend their strikes beyond the days of action to real unlimited strikes. Among these sectors were, most importantly, the oil refinery workers and sanitation workers. These two sectors, as long as they held out, applied these threats of unlivable difficulty (the threat of fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations for the refinery workers, the threat of towering mountains of filth for the sanitation workers) on the country (but especially the Parisian metropolis, I think, because for several weeks different parts of the sanitation industry (incinerators, collectors, truck depots) all organized to block trash collection in much of Paris, and especially its richer neighborhoods. There were maps of these different workplaces on strike that showed Paris besieged by its banlieue, as if this banlieue could bury the capital under its own trash heap of history).
So this second week of March, there were 5 days of consecutive demonstrations. This felt like a real escalation. The massive marches were complemented by a renewed effort by unionized workers—and unaffiliated radicals—to block workplaces and important choke points on roads and railways. I went to see that week, for example, the morning opening of a bus depot and an attempted picket by a minority of workers supported by a group of maybe 50 other people. This kind of group (militant but minority workers supported materially and on the spot by unaffiliated radicals) would replicate itself at different transportation depots and sanitation sites in Paris throughout the month. This articulation of unionized workplaces in key sectors (in fact sectors so central that they would be requisitioned by the government because posing a threat to national security) with the radical “autonomous” (but really not autonomous from the Left at all, and that’s fine, in fact that is what has worked) militants succeeded, before that wave of requisitions, in intensifying the social movement on two fronts.
First, the connection between unionized labor and radicals may have been important in bringing about a wave of circulation blockades in the second half of the month of March. Peripheriques, highways, and roundabouts were occupied and blocked in several major cities and even in the countryside; this tactic, previously claimed by the yellow vests or “autonomists,” was propagated massively, across the whole country, through union networks. The blockade, and the interruption of circulation generally, have become widely regarded as the adequate forms of activism or struggle since March (like near Marseille, when the CGT occupied a freeway one morning and pushed back the cops by shooting fireworks and dropping things from overpasses). So: the March actions pushed forward a new form for this movement: unionized key sectors + radical militant support.
Second, the success of the Parisian sanitation strike also provided the actual material for the next escalation of the movement: garbage. In the particularity of this strike (that it happened to be sanitation workers that went on strike, and that the radicals happened this time to be able to keep successful pickets in front of incinerators and depots), there appeared these heaps of trash for the next phase of the movement. So. General development was in a sense formal: the connection between components of the movement (unions and radicals in support). The particular development in Paris was in a sense material: heaps of trash could be set on fire. Starting the third week of March, when the government invoked Article 49.3 of the 5th Republic’s constitution (allowing laws to be pushed through the Assemblée without a vote on the principle of parliamentary confidence), this accumulation of garbage went up in flames nearly every night for weeks. There was this kind of undoing of the metropolis: where before the city had seemed so impersonal and indifferent to massive demonstrations and marches, now the city seemed to shrink at night, streets seemed to get closer to one another, heaps of burning trash marking the traces of little groups of rioters. These groups were strikingly young. The fact that high school seniors across France also took their last exams for their baccalaureat that week probably helped to infuse the movement with a younger composition (a new group, the Mouvement d’Action des Lycées Autonomes, was only formed in April). Anyway, the government that week (March 16-24) went through a sort of political-executive crisis, and two votes of no-confidence were voted down with very small margins.
There has seemed to be a mismatch since March regarding the temporalities of the social movement. The conflict climaxed the week between the 16thand 23rd of March, where all the timing did line up: the biggest riots were the nights of the invocation of the 49.3, then the voting down of the vote of no confidence, and then the union day of action on the 23rd. But since then, government time and movement time have diverged again: the law has been enacted and the government sticks with its bet that contestation will slowly fade away. The radical parts of the movement, on the other hand, have continued as if things were not at all over. The high school student movement only coalesced in April, and groups online have called for a competition between cities for the most extreme forms of disobedience. In April, several nights of “casserolades” were called for by the France Insoumise but also gilets jaunes networks, and these gatherings in front of city halls around the country to bang on pots and pans often ended in manifestations sauvages. I really can’t tell for now how things will continue. As long as there is trash in Paris, I think the spectacular images will continue to circulate and give off the general impression that things can’t go on this way. I imagine that popular participation will wean progressively, but that punctual actions will continue through the summer. The 2024 Olympic Games also seem to provide a new calendar of struggle against urban development and gentrification. (There’s also this strange calendar Macron has given himself, 100 days to make things better? Vs 100 jours de zbeul) Still, I can also imagine how very probable it is that the government does just hold out and wait for things to pass, and this social movement will not have any real end date, just melt away.
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