The government and police were entirely aware that the protests last Saturday would be violent. Violent protests had taken place on the past two Saturdays. So as I wrote here, they prepared for it. city-journal.org/police-handlin…
But they prepared for the wrong kind of violence, in the wrong places. On Friday, the Interior Minister predicted that 200 black-block protesters and 100 members of the far-right would join the protests.
“Vandalism and violence are unfortunately predictable,” said Denis Jacob, the secretary-general of one of France’s police unions, observing that this kind of violence usually occurs at the tail end of the rally. So what's their main concern? 1) Making sure that the large number
peaceful protesters get to protest peacefully, without having their protest ruined by 300 lunatic extremists; 2) making sure no one gets blown up by a suicide bomber; 3) making sure official buildings (like the Senata and US Embassy) are protected.
Oh! As important. 4) Making sure everyone got to shop, especially on the Champs-Elysées, which is the city’s biggest shopping arterial. This was key: The French economy couldn’t take the hit of another Saturday without pre-Christmas shopping revenues. The shopping must go on.
After giving these orders—which were proven incompatible—Macron departed for Argentina. As well he should have: That’s his job. People have been griping about how he wasn't here, but that was where the other world leaders were, and you hire a president to do that stuff.
You shouldn't need him to babysit when you riot. Okay, the Yellow Jackets are really a new phenomenon. They're not like things the police have seen here before. They're really a product of social media, and especially Facebook’s new algorithms, which promote “groups” over news.
When you join a Yellow Jacket group, you’re immediately enclosed in an impenetrable filter bubble, and it doesn’t matter what the government says after this. So the government can't communicate with them, no less work out protest routes or tell people its side of the story.
They don’t trust the mainstream media, and they don’t listen to it or watch it, they're organizing in their groups, and no one really knows what they plan to do. These groups had sort of converged on a plan to demonstrate on the Place de la Concorde, around the Eiffel Tower.
And some of them had had requested permission from the police to rally there. At first the police thought this was okay, then I think they got freaked out by the violence and what people were saying in these groups. So a communique went out from the Interior Ministry--“
:The right to protest is a fundamental one, and it is out of the question to ban the rally. However, it cannot take place on the Place de la Concorde, for obvious reasons of security.” It's politically out of the question to ban the demonstrations outright.
The right to assemble is as fundamental to France’s conception of itself as it is to the United States. But this is growingly looking like a security nightmare: All these people on the Place de la Concorde when the threat of terrorism in France is so high?
They can't say, "Look, folks, this isn't a good idea--we don't know how to keep you safe." That's a political non-starter. The opposition far-left and far-right parties, led by Jean-Luc Mélanchon and Marine Le Pen, are busy egging the protesters on, urging more people to come--
both are hoping to transform a spontaneous, leaderless movement into one organized and led by them, respectively. Both couldn't care less about public safety; they just want this movement to get out of control and then fall in their laps.
Naturally Russian propaganda organs have seized on these social media signals and amplified them. All are prepared to pounce immediately upon any restriction of the protests as a sign of the government’s fear of the people,
and any violent reaction to them as proof that Macron's a tyrant. But Concorde is *not* a good place for this. Look at the map to see why. Can you see on the map? Oh, the US Embassy is there, too. Imagine what Americans would have said--
--if the French let these libertarian, Trump-loving protesters storm the Embassy because they want to smother the President in kisses. That would be bad. So the Interior Ministry says, "Yes, but for security reasons, not THERE."
(During the French Revolution, the revolutionary government erected a guillotine there, which they used to execute King Louis XVI in front of cheering crowds. Later, when the revolution ate its own, it was used to execute the revolutionaries.)
(But that wasn’t the “obvious reason of security” to which he was referring. The obvious reason was its proximity to significant government buildings, including the National Assembly and the American Embassy.) To be continued ...
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