Tag Archives: History

Fascists on the rampage – then and now

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Thousands of far-right fanatics, many of them armed, gather in front of the seat of government, whipped-up by fake news and racist propaganda, convinced that the political elite is mired in corruption. They battle with the police, who open fire. At least 15 demonstrators and one police officer are killed and about 2,000 people are injured. One important far-right leader marches his troops away from the battle and the rest are forced to retreat.

You may notice that this is not what happened in Washington on Wednesday.

It is a very brief summary of events in Paris on 6 February 1934 when far-right groups collectively known as les ligues (let’s leave aside the debate of how fascist they were) demonstrated against a government that had been hit by a series of corruption scandals and had decided to transfer the right-wing prefect of police, Jean Chiappe, to Morocco.

Corruption, anti-Semitism, xenophobia

Over the preceding weeks, there had been a series of right-wing demonstrations against corruption, fuelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, as well as another French right-wing hobby-horse, anti-freemasonry.  

Veterans’ groups aligned with the Communist Party, at the time still tied to the third period line that dubbed social-democrats “social-fascists”, had also organised their own simultaneous protests.

Far-right demonstrators face police on Paris’s Place de la Concorde

This all culminated in the 6 February demonstrations, during which thousands of far-right street-fighters assembled in various parts of Paris, a large number of them in front of the National Assembly. Many were carrying projectiles, fireworks or fire-arms, as well as ball-bearings to throw under the hooves police horses or poles with razor blades attached to cut their tendons.

Unlike the US authorities, the French government pulled out the police in force. Then as now, nobody would accuse French cops of being woolly-minded liberals but, having already suffered the attentions of the right-wing militias on previous protests, they opened fire in response to explosions that may or may not have been shots, with the results noted above.

The contrast with the failure to mobilise adequate defence for the Capitol and the lack of the police’s customary brio when it comes to crowd control is obvious. Then again, the sitting French president had not incited the mob to demonstrate.

The riot inspired an immediate debate as to whether there had been at attempted putsch. In both cases, the insurgents don’t seem to have had a coherent plan and didn’t know what to do once they had put thousands on the streets, or in the American case, in the seat of government.

Left unites against fascism

So what happened after the 1934 riot?

Its immediate result was a shift to the right in government, which led to the first appearance of Marshall Philippe Pétain in a ministerial position. (According to General Bornet, he revoked the honour awarded to garde mobile who was killed during the riot and the medal was removed from the officer’s coffin in front of his family as they attended his funeral.)

But, coup attempt or not, the presence of thousands of armed far-right activists on the streets shocked the left into action.

The French Communist Party joined the Socialist Party (SFIO) in demonstrations and strikes against fascism and was instrumental in persuading the Communist International to ditch the third period’s sectarianism.

That in turn led to the 1936 election of the popular front government, led by the SFIO with the bourgeois Radical Socialists holding ministerial posts and the Communists supporting from outside.

The popular front government is still remembered for important reforms – the introduction of the first paid holidays and unemployment pay, the reduction of the working week from 48 hours to 40, and the nationalisation of the rail network and other important industries, although it was a massive strike movement that forced this radical turn.

The bad news is that it failed in its initial primary aim, that of preventing fascism.

A significant number of members of the 200 families who notoriously controlled the French economy at the time – the Michelins, Renaults, Cotys, Taittingers (you’ll notice that these names are still around) – continued to finance the far right, sponsoring anti-Semitism, coup plots and reactionary conspiracy theories as an ideological bulwark against the expropriation of their wealth.

They chose Pétain and collaboration with the Nazis when it came to the national humiliation of 1940. And, while a few of the far right took their patriotism seriously and joined the resistance, many of the ligues’ members ended up in the Vichy government’s militias, in the editorial chairs of collaborationist papers or in important political positions.

Post-Trump Republicans and the modern militias

The US today is clearly not the same as France in the 30s.

Trump is on his way out of office and the violent attempts to prevent his departure have fizzled out.

But, despite all the talk of “moderate” Republicans being forced to distance themselves from him, he has pushed his party even further to the right. Despite all the racism, vulgarity, narcissism and contempt for democratic institutions, the mainstream Republican voter cast his or her ballot for Trump. To really build a worthwhile momentum, the ambitious careerist has to fire up the crazies with just those attributes that shock the rest of us so that is the path many Republicans seem likely to follow over the next few years.

Although the spectre of Bolshevism may not be obviously haunting the West, the US and Europe have entered an era of economic, social, demographic and ideological turmoil. Capitalism is being called into question, especially by young people, in a way it has not been since long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, capital is increasingly addicted to short-term gains, emptying businesses’ coffers to pay out dividends and enormous salaries to top bosses. Many of the wealthy are deeply committed to defending their right to amass ever vaster fortunes, especially in the US where a kind of neo-Calvinism preaches that the rich are rich because they deserve to be so.

This is now the Republicans’ creed. Combined with white suprematism and a load of other ideological junk, it is the dogma of the Proud Boys and other modern-day ligues and the lumpen bourgeoisie will continue to sponsor them.

Nobody but an idiot would expect the Biden presidency to come up with any reforms as significant as those of the French Popular Front. That means it will be an even less reliable bulwark against the right, once they have caught their breath and launched new political offensives.

Polarisation, turmoil, confusion lie ahead of us. The looming climate catastrophe means that the long-term stakes are even higher than in the 1930s, while those who oppose the solutions remain as ruthless as ever. Let’s hope we have the courage and the means to face them down.

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Police brutality in France – it’s not that new

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The French police are the subject of much controversy these days. They have always faced a certain amount of opposition, sometimes of an extremely radical nature. Here’s an example from 110 years ago.

Jean-Jacques Liabeuf fights with the police, as reported in a contemporary newspaper

In 1910 a cobbler called Jean-Jacques Liabeuf went on a bar-crawl near Les Halles, then the site of the markets that kept Paris supplied with food. At his last port of call, just before 8.00am, Liabeuf brandished a knife with a 20-centimetre-long blade and announced that he was going to “rub out” at least two cops that day.

The police were duly called and two officers grabbed him as he left the establishment.

But they screamed with pain and let go of their target, who had wrapped leather sleeves packed with nails around his arms, concealing them beneath the cape he was wearing.

The weapons Liabeuf was carrying Source: Wikipedia

He than ran off to a neighbouring building, pursued by the police officers. There he stabbed one of them, Célestin Deray, eight times, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest and the stomach.  He stabbed the other, Constable Fournès, in the throat, also injuring three other cops who arrived before being himself stabbed with a sabre and taken to hospital. A crowd of onlookers had formed and tried to lynch him.

Deray died from his wounds.

Framed as a pimp

I came across this story on a fascinating Facebook page devoted to recounting aspects of the history of Paris through images.

A police photo of Jean-Jacques Liabeuf

Predictably, given the debate currently raging about law and order, the post inspired a number of comments along the lines of “People were already attacking law enforcement then”.

But another reader gave us an idea why Liabeuf was not too enamoured of the constabulary.

Born in Saint Etienne, he had come to the capital after serving several short prison sentences and being sent to fight in France’s colonial adventures in Africa.

In Paris he met and fell in love with Alexandrine Pigeon, a prostitute whose pimp, Gaston, was a police informer.

He was arrested, along with Alexandrine, by two members of the anti-prostitution police and after a trial which his lawyer did not bother to attend – he sent a message to the court that he was busy eating his lunch – jailed for three months for living off immoral earnings.

At the end of his sentence, Liabeuf breached an order not to return to Paris, was arrested and served another month in jail.

It was after that sentence that he came to Paris again, convinced that he had been fitted up and determined to avenge himself on the cops who had sent him down. He did not find them and Deray and Fournès paid the price of protecting their colleagues.

Riot in the shadow of the guillotine

Unsurprisingly, Liabeuf was condemned to death. But, at a time when police were used against striking furniture-makers and railworkers, his case became a cause célèbre for the French left, with radical papers pointing to the injustice of his previous conviction and the apparent corruption of the officers who arrested him.

The funeral of anarchist Henri Cler, killed during a clash with police during a furniture-makers’ strike in 1910

President Armand Fallières having rejected a petition calling for Liabeuf’s pardon, a crowd of about 10,000 – including Lenin, Picasso and French socialist leader Jean Jaurès – turned out on the morning he was due to be guillotined.

A number of demonstrators were arrested or injured in clashes with the police and, after an anarchist shot a cop while trying to free Liabeuf to the cheers of the crowd, the prefect sent in the cavalry, with sabres drawn. The wounded police officer, part of a brigade specially devoted to tracking anarchists, later died.

So the police were not particularly popular with those sections of the population most likely to be on the receiving end of their attentions, often perceived as using arbitrary violence in defence of an unjust social order.

Police station attacked

That’s also true today.

The only police station in Champigny-sur-Marne, where I live, has been attacked three times, twice this year and nationwide the number of attacks on police rose 14% in the first nine months of this year.

https://twitter.com/LeCapricieux94/status/1315050472810708994?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1315050472810708994%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.francetvinfo.fr%2Ffaits-divers%2Fpolice%2Fchampigny-sur-marne-un-commissariat-attaque-dans-la-nuit-par-une-quarantaine-de-personnes_4137345.html

Some 96 officers are reported to have been injured at a demonstration against the government’s proposed security law last Saturday.

But, then again, so were a number of demonstrators and journalists at that protest and at a violent police raid on an improvised migrants’ camp last Tuesday. They have not received a phone call from Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who says he has spoken to most of the injured cops.

And so was Michel Zecler, a black music producer, beaten and racially insulted by police who followed him into his studio in Paris last week, apparently with the intention of fining him for failing to wear an anti-Covid mask.

Michel Zecler after his encounter with police in Paris

And so were about 30 people who lost either an eye or a hand during the Gilets jaunes demonstrations in 2018, nor the demonstrators clubbed or teargassed on protests against changes to labour law in 2016, not to mention an ever-growing number of banlieue residents, usually belonging to racial minorities, who have been insulted, chased or beaten by the forces of the law.

Many of these assaults came to light because they were filmed, a procedure the government, under pressure from right-wing police unions, means to make more difficult with the controversial article 24 of its security bill.

Here’s an illustration of why that is a bad idea.

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Coronavirus diary day 79 – Black lives matter in France, too

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Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.

But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.

The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.

The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.

Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.

Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.

Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.

Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?

But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.

“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.

Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.

In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends

.

Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.

In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.

Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.

My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.

They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.

Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.

The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.

Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.


Asylum-seekers, eh?

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 46 – A May Day minus manifs and muguet

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Facebook sent me one of those reminders of what I was doing this time last year this morning – photos of teargas, black blockers, Yellow Vests and trade unionists on last year’s May Day demonstration. (You can see the pictures and read my account of the day here.)

There’ll be none of that this year. Although this loyal union activist set off for the manif. “It’s habit!” she declares.

Given that they can’t march, the unions, who as usual can’t agree on joint demands and action, are trying to “occupy the visible space”, ie post things online.

The most left-wing ones, the CGT, Solidaires and the teachers’ union FSU, have for the first time joined forces with ecology campaigners, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to call for more resources for public services, repatriation of capital that has fled abroad and better conditions for those workers who have proved themselves vital during the crisis.

Supporters of the party that used to be called the Front National can watch video of their leaders placing a wreath on the Paris statue of Joan of Arc and slog their way through an hour-long speech by Marine Le Pen.

Muguet, Photo Kajebi II (Wikimedia Commons)

Also absent from the streets will be sellers of muguet (lily of the valley). The French give each other bunches of the flowers in the spring. The charming tradition apparently goes back to the Middle Ages and there are different legends as to which king, queen or other aristocrat started it.

The association with May Day itself has its downside. Before World War II left-wingers apparently used to wear dog roses on International Workers’ Day. The collaborationist Pétain government felt obliged to rebrand the communistic festival, renaming it Labour Day and encouraging people to wear the “national” muguet. The poor old dog rose never made a comeback.

Gaul is divided into three parts, almost. The government’s Covid-19 map has three categories, red (bad), orange (could do better) and green (soon-to-be-liberated). It will be revised before 11 May but it gives a good idea of which areas will be kept in some sort of lockdown.

The classification is based on three criteria: The estimated level of infection in a département, how overstretched hospitals are, and the capacity to carry out tests (there are actually two different maps, one for each of the first two criteria).

The north-east of the country, including the Paris region, is red, as are three other départements, one of them overseas. The south-east and much of the centre is orange. And most of the west and the Channel coast is green.

But no sooner had the map been published than some regional leaders claimed their fiefdoms should not be classed red at all. There have been hardly any cases in the north of Corsica, the south-western département of the Lot and the Cher in the centre.

In the Lot there are only 15 people in hospital at the moment, down from 27 a week ago, and only one in intensive care, down from nine.

Health officials say the confusion is due to errors in the way the statistics on admissions to emergency departments have been compiled.

They have a week to get their shit together, since the map drawn up on 7 May will decide which areas can go for full on déconfinement and which will remain under a form of lockdown, although what that means in details still seems unclear to me.

Are we dropping our guard? There seemed to be more traffic on the streets when I last made a trip to the shops, to days ago. My former colleague Jessica Phelan has also noticed this in Italy.

A new poll shows a slight drop in observation of anti-virus precautions in France, although the use of masks has risen.

We don’t want a second wave, people!

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,376, 289 in the past 24 hours. 26,283 people are in hospital, down 551 in the last day, with 4,019 in intensive care, down 188. 49,476 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,248 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 36 – Will the virus change politics forever?

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An opinion poll shows growing dissatisfaction with the French government’s handling of the Coronavirus epidemic and divisions have opened up in Macron’s party. Will the crisis shatter preconceived ideas or reinforce them?

San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague, Lucao Giordano

Shortly before the virus hit us, I visited the Luca Giordano exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais museum.

By eerie coincidence, some of the works on show were inspired by the plague outbreak in Naples in 1656.

One, by Micco Spadaro, is a gruesome portrayal of the devastation it caused. Sufferers are confined to a square, where they drop dead on the ground. Workers – one account says they were “Turks or galley slaves” – remove the bodies.

The Plague in Naples on the Piazza Mercatello, Domenico Gargiulo known as Micco Spadaro

Giordano’s painting is a thank you to the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro. You might think that the saint did not fufil his contractual obligations, given that he failed to prevent the deaths of 250,000 of the city’s 450,000 population and 50-60% of the inhabitants of what was then an independent kingdom.

But that’s not the way the church fathers viewed his performance. They told the faithful he was responsible for ending the epidemic, although Martinus Ludheim, a doctor from Bavaria who was visiting the city, seems to have had something to do with it. Giordano’s picture is entitled San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague.

We’ll never know if the loss of loved ones undermined any of the survivors’ faith in the saint or in an all-loving god. If you had made it through the epidemic, you didn’t want to end up being burnt at the stake for heresy. But ceremonies to thank the saint for deliverance seem to have been well attended and the Catholic religion has been pretty well-ensconced in the city in the intervening centuries.

Will the Coronavirus epidemic shake our certainties?

In a sense, it already has. Governments who worshipped at the altar of budgetary rigour have turned to epidemo-Keynesianism.

A new French opinion poll shows 85% of respondents want more to be spent on the health service, something the Macron government failed to do before the virus hit. It will be difficult to return to austerity in any form, whatever the pressure to pay for the present public largesse.

The Ipsos poll shows 58% dissatisfied with the way the crisis has been handled, up from 46% a month ago, while 45% say they are angry about the situation.

There is overwhelming support for the lockdown, at 77%. So the main bone of contention would not seem to be disciplined solidarity but the lack of masks and tests and the government’s U-turns on those questions.

Of course, opinion polls have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as several election and referendum results have shown, and the public mood will undoubtedly change when the epidemic finally ends.

Meanwhile, divisions have opened up in Macron’s party, La République en Marche. In the light of the crisis, some MPs who deserted the Socialist Party at the last election are calling for “social-Macronism”, which might involve more money for the health service, restraint of dividend payments and redistribution of profits to the low-paid.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 20,265, up 547 in 24 hours. 30,584 people are in hospital, down 26, and 5,638 are in intensive care, down 61. 37,409 patients have been discharged, 831 of them yesterday.

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Macron minister in French farce after false May Day demo claim

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France’s minister for machismo, Christophe Castaner, has covered himself in ridicule by falsely claiming that a group of demonstrators attacked a hospital during this week’s May Day demonstration in Paris.

Police stop demonstrators by the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital

Castaner, a former Socialist who lobbied hard to become interior minister in the Macron government after another Socialist defector, Gérard Collomb, ducked out, has seized on any pretext to try to discredit protests against the government, whether they be the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the trade unions or the left.

On May Day they all marched together and Castaner’s twitter finger was clearly itching. Before the day was out he had announced that a group of demonstrators had “attacked” the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, assaulted a member of the hospital staff and forced entry into the resuscitation unit.

Unfortunately for Monsieur le Ministre, hospital staff denied his version of events and video shot at the scene showed demonstrators fleeing teargas and stun grenades fired by the police. They had blocked a section of the demonstration from advancing towards the Place d’Italie, as their colleagues came to grips with demonstrators further up the road (see my account of those events here).

Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested and detained for nearly 30 hours but then released without charge.

On Sunday they presented a joint statement to the media, complaining of Castaner’s attempts to exploit their case for political purposes and thanking the hospital staff who came forward to give an accurate account of what had gone on.

Castaner is one of a long line of Socialist defectors who seem to believe they must prove some sort of political manhood by declaring their undying love for the police and all their works.

The now utterly unloved Manuel Valls, who was interior minister before becoming prime minister and is currently a soon-to-be unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Barcelona, suffered from the same syndrome.

By coincidence, today I read an account of German Social Democrat Gustav Noske’s suppression of the 1919 “Spartakist uprising” in Berlin.

“Someone must play the bloodhound I will not shirk my duty,” he declared as he led the Freikorps into the city to massacre over 1,000 rebels and assassinate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Formally dissolved in 1921, the Freikorps were the soil from which the Nazi militias and the Waffen-SS grew.

The Nazis later booted Noske out of his minister’s position and he retired from politics after Hitler became German chancellor. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 but released after a few months, only to be detained again in 1944 after the attempt on Hitler’s life.

He was interned in Fürstenberg/Havel concentration camp, then in Ravensbrück, before being transferred to Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse priso, from which he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Be careful what demons you unleash!

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