You might have heard about the French elections. I mean, if you know how to read you might have. It seemed to be all over the Internet news, anyway, so I might be making a leap of faith, but I’m going to assume you’ve heard something about it. If you haven’t, I invite you to step onto Earth. Spring has hit the Northern hemisphere and it’s just lovely there.
I have a few French friends at this point, and they are almost all Socialist party supporters. So between that and the fact that Nicholas Sarkozy has been presenting himself as a racist nutjob since the beginning of the campaign, I have become something of an impromptu Socialist Party supporter here.
The other consideration is that even though I’ve been following the news here in France, French politics are incredibly character-based and it’s virtually impossible to know all 400,000 of them. As far as I’m concerned, they could make French Politician trading cards in the Pokemon style. Segolene would have an attack called “Make a campaign faux pas” and Sarkozy would have attacks called “Turkey is in Asia Minor” and “Inspire car fires”.
But I digress. When one friend sent me a text message inviting me to come watch the election results in front of the Socialist Party headquarters with her, I jumped at the chance. Sarah, like me, is a refugee from the glaciers class. But instead of suffering silently through it like I did, she altogether gave up on the Paris 1 geography department by dropping her double major. Since she made that fateful decision in the middle of last semester, I’ve seen a lot less of her. At 6:40 in the evening I, with the rest of the balloon-toting, banner-carrying Segolene Royal supporters, stepped out of the 12 train at metro Solferino.
Sarah and I had made no fixed rendez-vous point, and upon stepping out of the metro, I found myself in a beautiful little plaza on Boulevard St-Germain facing a closed off street. Both were quickly filling with Socialist partisans, who spilled out into the boulevard and seemed to be making the traffic more and more difficult. I made a circuit of all the different metro exits to make sure Sarah wasn’t at any of them before stepping across the street toward the Parti Socialist (PS) headquarters.
The cops had cordoned off the street in front of the headquarters for a length of two city blocks. The PS had set up a projection screen at the back of this section of street, but an hour and a half before the results were to be unveiled, it wasn’t showing anything in particular. TV crews for various channels had set up cameras around the periphery, some on tripods and some on cranes, and one small one hanging off a pole that dangled over the crowd. The mass became more and more dense toward the front, but fortunately, Sarah has very particular hair, and I was able to spot her halfway in. I followed her for five minutes, trying to punch out a text message on my phone to tell her to stop moving. At some point, however, she turned around and we caught eye contact. I pushed through the throng of red shirts and caught up with her.
We did the bise. “It was meant to be,” she said. “I was beginning to get worried. I was about to call.”
She introduced me to her friend, Margot, who had just recently returned from her own Erasmus exchange in England, before pointing me to turn around to grab a flag with Segolene Royal’s face on it from a man who was giving them out. And with flags in hand, we all pushed forward into the crush. It only thickened from where we were. We passed men with “Stop Sarko” badges and women with banners sporting the names of various organisations tied to the Socialist Party: the Movement for Young Socialists, for example. At about two thirds of the way to the front, Sarah and Margot were satisfied and we stopped moving.
At 7:00 the TV was switched to France 2: think France’s answer to the BBC. The presenters started speaking in patriotic terms about how historic this election was and how it would decide the course of the country; that’s such a common thing to say during election season that I think it’s practically a truism, but in these circumstances there was probably some truth to it. After two or three minutes of what the French call “blabla,” France 2 cut to a computer-generated introductory sequence for the show. It depicted three comet-like streams of blue, white, and red smoke surging past the La Defense business district, around the Arc de Triomphe, and into the Elysees Palace: the President’s mansion. The crowd roared; Sarah and Margot with them. I laughed.
“What?” Sarah prodded.
“How is it that I’m standing here with a Segolene Royal flag in front of the PS headquarters in Paris?” I said. “It’s pretty bizarre.”
She smiled. “Fun, isn’t it?” she said.
And for the next hour we watched as the talking heads on France 2 went at it. For the record, the male anchor had eyes that were disconcertingly close to each other. Each time he or his female counterpart mentioned the Socialist Party or Segolene Royal, or showed footage of our mob, everyone erupted in cheer and waved banners and flags. When Sarkozy was mentioned, there were boos and shrieks of anger. For a while it was good fun. There was a certain level of solidarity in the group. I saw and heard more than a few phone numbers change hands. Cheers erupted spontaneously.
Then, at 7:59, the Mr. Close-Eyes reported that the results were in and would be announced shortly. An onscreen timer ticked downwards and the crowd screamed. Five, four…
“We’re estimating this at 53% for Sarkozy,” said the anchor.
I looked at Sarah. The normally sharp and dispassionate girl’s face had gone completely red, and she was biting her nails. Margot was squinting at the screen, completely lost. Sobs were heard in every direction. A good half of the banners and flags fell out of vision. Streams of people turned around and started for the metro station. They were replaced by TV crews and journalists, who descened vulture-like into the crowd and seemed to poach the people in the worst emotional states. From our vantage point, I counted at least twenty television cameras. I thought about what I’d say if they somehow found me; something about how foreigners were also invested this country, and not all Americans supported Sarkozy.
Some fifteen minutes later, Segolene appeared onscreen to give a concession speech. The crowd cheered at her sight; it would be the evening’s last real cheer. She delivered her entire speech smiling like an idiot: the contrast between her face and those of her supporters was palpable and ridiculous. I don’t even remember what she said; something about the fight continuing in the National Assembly, and how the Left would never concede defeat. Sarah swallowed hard, snagged a cigarette from a passerby, lit it, and took a long drag. She passed it to me. I followed suit. And I don’t even smoke. But being one person in the presence of ten thousand grieving faces does something to you…
But when Nicholas Sarkozy, Darth Vader himself, appeared on the TV another twenty minutes later, the woe disappeared and was replaced with raw anger. The entire crowd booed; many flicked their middle fingers toward the screen. I have virtually no idea what he said because virtually every word was drowned out in heckling. At one point he mentioned the United States, probably with the line that the two countries were friends but that friends could have disagreements. “Hey, the United States!” Sarah called at me, reaching around my back and giving me half a hug. I groaned and let my head drop.
At the end of Sarkozy’s speech, we started back toward the metro. The crowd had dissipated some, and the back half of the cordoned off area was empty. We crossed a few camera crews in process of “interviewing” passers-by who were generally more interested in yelling than being in actual interviews. Sarah walked into a number of frames, yelled “long live the spirit of 1968!” (which sounds a lot more pithy in French), and left. The Metro station was absolutely filled with people, and cops lined the walls. One was about to nab a man who had managed to sneak his way halfway through a turnstile but was stuck; Sarah put her ticket through there, thus setting him free.
We had heard about a Movement of Young Socialists rally that was to be held at the Place de la Bastille, so we set off to meet some of Sarah’s friends there. We got off the 12 at Concorde to catch a 1 train; on an upwards escalator, a mass of 20-something teenagers shouted “Sarko ! Facho ! Le peuple aura ta peau !” – “Sarko, fascist, the people will have your hide” – as a TV camera rolled.
The Paris metro is set up in groupings of four seats: two pairs of two that face each other. We found a bank of seats with three free, one being consumed by a man in his mid thirties in a grey fleece. The three of us started talking, and Grey-Fleece ultimately joined in, asking questions about the rally after seeing that two of us held Segolene Royal flags. He asked if I was English and was surprised to hear that I was American; apparently Americans have universally bad accents, and most of us seem not to talk very intelligently in the “Hey, that station is named after a dead president!” 1 train.
When we got out of the train, Sarah’s friends were waiting for us. I was introduced to the group as Sam, “American-Canadian-French.” It’s by far the first time I’ve ever been identified as having three nationalities. And I’ve never been introduced as having anything to do with France. That moment stayed in my head for a long time.
The group, now at seven or eight people, walked at a brisk pace toward the Place de la Bastille. The last block was sectioned off. We walked past riot police with clear plastic shields, with large blue armored vans at their backs. We arrived around 8:45; the Young Socialists were nowhere to be seen, but a band of anarchists had climbed the statue in the middle of the Place: the slogan “Sarko, fils de macro” (Sarkozy, son of a pimp) was clearly legible in white paint. By the time the Socialists arrived half an hour later, the anarchists’ ranks had swelled and they were waving flares. A bonfire was lit in the plaza. A man entering the plaza revved his motorcycle. A few people threw beer bottles.
We stayed for an hour or so. Nothing happened while I was there, really, but after we watched a large mass of people surge toward us, we decided this was not going to end well and that it was high time to go. I, for one, didn’t feel like getting arrested; I didn’t have my papers on me, and that alone would have qualified me for some kind of penalty. We retreated past the riot police, through the Marais, where large bands of Orthodox Jews were swirling about, happily discussing Sarkozy’s election. Sarah and Margot went home, and I, in no mood to go home and eat pasta, dropped in on my friends up in the third arrondissement.
When I left their apartment three hours later, the riot police were facing Bastille, backing toward the Place de la Republique. I read in the newspaper the next morning that the demonstration had escalated into a riot and that the police had used tear gas. A car had apparently been set ablaze in the area. The day after, I saw the same incident reported in the New York Times, but fortunately I wasn’t there to witness it. There were some 100 arrests.
There is nothing like a big, emotional day of politics to make a foreigner feel that he has a place in a country in which he’s only a temporary resident. And not to get personal and weepy, because some of you have historically only read this blog because I make a lot of snippy comments, but the emotion and passion that ran over in the streets did a huge number on me. When I arrived in September, I knew nobody and got flustered ordering food in bakeries. And yet, this past Sunday, I ran around town to political rallies with friends who spoke French natively and with whom I was able to communicate without much trouble. This progression has never really dawned on me, because I have been very critical of my ability to speak this language.
So this was an interesting political day, and one that has made me think a lot about this country and my own position in it. Maybe it’s stupid that I’m getting worked up over someone else’s election day. I don’t care.
