As Paris burns, politicians are showing little sense of duty

Mounted police charging the streets is a rare sight in Paris. So are the navy-blue armoured vehicles of the gendarmerie. As for small shops, big stores, museums, gardens and libraries boarded up or closed on a Saturday two weeks before Christmas, and tear gas sifting through shut windows on fourth-floor flats, Parisians hadn’t seen this in half a century.

It looks, however, as if the heavy police presence and precautionary measures paid off, with somewhat less violence and depredations than on the previous Saturday of protest by the gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests”.

It was what Parisians and the French expected from their government, that law and order be defended. However, this doesn’t mean the French don’t feel sympathy for the protest — 66 per cent support them. The French have always liked a revolt by proxy and the hardship of the squeezed lower-middle classes, who represent the peaceful bulk of the gilets jaunes, is an experience known and shared by many French families.

What makes this revolt unlike any other in recent decades is that it is leaderless, apolitical and has refused so far the democratic principles of delegation, representation, negotiation; it even openly deems the elected head of state “illegitimate” and wants him forcibly removed by “the people”.

As an investigation by The Times showed at the weekend, many gilets jaunes have been rehashing and spreading fake news generated by Kremlin- controlled media outlets and Russian Twitter and Facebook accounts. Their protest has been infiltrated by violent militants from both the far-Right and radical Left joining forces to overthrow the République. Needless to say, there are only a few thousand of them but they have nonetheless showed the ability to disturb daily life. Their actions have impacted the economy with, as reported by Le Journal du Dimanche, 863 companies having had to lay off staff because of the disruption.

What has been even more worrying to see has been the irresponsibility of an important part of the French political class. While both the extreme Right leader Marine Le Pen and radical Left chief Jean-Luc Mélenchon have been complacently fanning the flames of insurrection for political gain, other figures seem to have spectacularly lost reason.

The Leftist French MP François Ruffin, wrapped in the tricolor, declared in front of the Elysée Palace that “President Emmanuel Macron will know the same fate as John Kennedy.” Rightist MP Nicolas Dupont-Aignan said three times on French television that interior minister Christophe Castaner had sent his own thugs to ransack the Arc de Triomphe.

The French may like a protest but they also rely on their elected representatives to look for solutions instead of inciting hatred and bringing more chaos to a very volatile situation. As I write these lines, the gilets jaunes have called for a fifth Saturday of protest.

Agnes Poirier is a French journalist.