The March of the Republic
Sunday was my first manifestation in Paris. I went with my girlfriend. How ironic that the first time I got out of my tiny apartment and into the streets for a cause, it would be for a commemoration like this. My girl liked to mock me. I think the richest part of this was for her was actually seeing me go through some sort of civic duty. The march for the Republic, they called it. The march was to show solidarity. Probably the most important of French values of all the values listed on the seal. Of liberty and equality and fraternity, I believe the French take the fraternity part the most seriously. These manifestations are in the blood.
Yes we were walking for France, but no one would really admit this. There were tri color flags and people singing the anthem, but the intellectual raison d'etre was for values. The freedom to speak your mind. The cartoonists had held us to this principal with their own blood whether we had asked for it or not. And now we were walking. Being around this many people and being at their mercy goes against every instinct in my body. I was battling both my fear of crowds and my intense dislike of demonstrations. In the past, the only demonstration I wanted to go to in Paris was a demonstration against demonstrations. Because in the United States I feel left. In France I feel slightly edged out the right as there is no place for a free market capitalist in French society even if he believes in gay marriage. This is just the way it is. But here I was, part of the massive flock of humanity heading in to the streets around Republique this Sunday.
It began as a trickle of electricity. Leaving my home and walking down the Rue de Belleville was like being part of a slow and steady exodus. The kind of scene reserved for episodes of the Twilight Zone when the population of a city is forced to migrate out of the city by foot because some unknown force has taken over the city. Alien invasion. Zombie apocalypse. Cartoonists getting shot. We were heading downward, a stream of hipsters and middle aged families. The Chinese residents of Belleville seemed to ignore us. They were busy checking their stocks of cabbages for sales. The 30 euro street prostitutes were out looking onto the mass migration curiously. They seemed genuinely perplexed that so many people would walk around in mass on a Sunday. These were the margins. Then there were the young Maghreban youth that stood outside cafés and mocked the flow of traffic. I heard one of them talk about his disgust that we were out to honor Israel’s leader Netenyahu, who was only a few blocks away getting his photo call. But the mocking felt funny. Like the neighborhood grumps.
One youth on the Rue Fontaine de Roi called out to a hooded youth on the other side of the street. "Are you Charlie?". The other replied that he was “Charlie Chaplin” so at least he had a sense of humor about it. I was impressed also that he knew who Charlie Chaplin was. We reached Boulevard Richard Lenoir. It was not far from where the police man known as “Ahmed” had been shot just a few days earlier. Despite there being more skin color than concrete, no one shouted, no one made the usual edgy comments. Everyone seemed to fall in line like building blocks for a larger purpose.
We joined the flow heading up Avenue de Republique. Some parts were a human parking lot where one false move would have caused a stampede. But nothing happened, only the momentary spontaneous applause. A beautiful ripple of clapping. This happened every so often and started as a single person and ended in a few thousand, like waves on the ocean that swell into existence. If it had only been an audio record, it would have been worth preserving only to play back in times of crisis. Clapping like this I could listen to any day in a massage parlor in the place of whale sounds. Toward the place de la Republique was a sea of souls. Banners and signs hanging from balconies. The occasional resident looking down. Some with the front pages of Charlie Hebdo and Liberation cut out and pasted on to the iron grilling on their balconies as tributes. It seemed like perhaps this was the way the end of World War Two must have felt: not all joy. Joy and insecurity. Death and insecurity mixed with a collective will to turn the page. A measured celebration.
The crowd began thinning out and allowed me the time to collect my sense of personal space back. That was until a red haired homeless man with a sharp beard, had a huge grin on his face and begun swinging himself around with his large backpack. He came close to whacking others wit it. He couldn't help it he said. On a day like this he was giddy. Normally, he is the only vagrant in a crowd, but today we were all vagrants. "I'm sorry" he apologized as he spun around. "I'm just a grain of sand", he kept repeating in French. "This day is not about you being a grain of sand monsieur", I felt like telling him. This day is about us all being the beach together so stop swinging your backpack around. But in the interest of solidarity, I held my tongue as everyone else seemed to be doing the same.
We got to the Pére Lechaise cemetary and I looked up to see an American flag draped from a balcony. I saw some girls were drinking and smoking above a sign that read in English "We are Charlie" over the flag. It seemed a half assed effort. If these girls really wanted to be Charlie, they'd be out in this parade with the rest of us. Tortoise shell armored cops were visible at the crossroads. They looked on vigilantly. But there was no fear in their eyes. Before we got to Nation, the sun was setting. The cold began to creep into our jacket sleeves. I understood a few things about these marches. It was good to be a part of a mass. It doesn't feel logical but the French have these worked into their DNA so we had been in good hands. It was good to feel that kind of trust in one's fellow man if only for a moment.
Along the cafés of the Boulevard, the youth of the banlieu were still looking on curiously. "Look at all these Charlies", they said. Even if they were not on the march, I think they could recognize that it was good to see people caring about an idea again. It was good to break the cliché of the western shopper, thinking of only what he is going to buy in the January sales and actually commit himself as much to an idea as those that shot the cartoonist had committed to theirs. And for a brief moment, in this fractured society that is Paris, perhaps I smelt the slightest whiff of respect.
Sunday was my first manifestation in Paris. I went with my girlfriend. How ironic that the first time I got out of my tiny apartment and into the streets for a cause, it would be for a commemoration like this. My girl liked to mock me. I think the richest part of this was for her was actually seeing me go through some sort of civic duty. The march for the Republic, they called it. The march was to show solidarity. Probably the most important of French values of all the values listed on the seal. Of liberty and equality and fraternity, I believe the French take the fraternity part the most seriously. These manifestations are in the blood.
Yes we were walking for France, but no one would really admit this. There were tri color flags and people singing the anthem, but the intellectual raison d'etre was for values. The freedom to speak your mind. The cartoonists had held us to this principal with their own blood whether we had asked for it or not. And now we were walking. Being around this many people and being at their mercy goes against every instinct in my body. I was battling both my fear of crowds and my intense dislike of demonstrations. In the past, the only demonstration I wanted to go to in Paris was a demonstration against demonstrations. Because in the United States I feel left. In France I feel slightly edged out the right as there is no place for a free market capitalist in French society even if he believes in gay marriage. This is just the way it is. But here I was, part of the massive flock of humanity heading in to the streets around Republique this Sunday.
It began as a trickle of electricity. Leaving my home and walking down the Rue de Belleville was like being part of a slow and steady exodus. The kind of scene reserved for episodes of the Twilight Zone when the population of a city is forced to migrate out of the city by foot because some unknown force has taken over the city. Alien invasion. Zombie apocalypse. Cartoonists getting shot. We were heading downward, a stream of hipsters and middle aged families. The Chinese residents of Belleville seemed to ignore us. They were busy checking their stocks of cabbages for sales. The 30 euro street prostitutes were out looking onto the mass migration curiously. They seemed genuinely perplexed that so many people would walk around in mass on a Sunday. These were the margins. Then there were the young Maghreban youth that stood outside cafés and mocked the flow of traffic. I heard one of them talk about his disgust that we were out to honor Israel’s leader Netenyahu, who was only a few blocks away getting his photo call. But the mocking felt funny. Like the neighborhood grumps.
One youth on the Rue Fontaine de Roi called out to a hooded youth on the other side of the street. "Are you Charlie?". The other replied that he was “Charlie Chaplin” so at least he had a sense of humor about it. I was impressed also that he knew who Charlie Chaplin was. We reached Boulevard Richard Lenoir. It was not far from where the police man known as “Ahmed” had been shot just a few days earlier. Despite there being more skin color than concrete, no one shouted, no one made the usual edgy comments. Everyone seemed to fall in line like building blocks for a larger purpose.
We joined the flow heading up Avenue de Republique. Some parts were a human parking lot where one false move would have caused a stampede. But nothing happened, only the momentary spontaneous applause. A beautiful ripple of clapping. This happened every so often and started as a single person and ended in a few thousand, like waves on the ocean that swell into existence. If it had only been an audio record, it would have been worth preserving only to play back in times of crisis. Clapping like this I could listen to any day in a massage parlor in the place of whale sounds. Toward the place de la Republique was a sea of souls. Banners and signs hanging from balconies. The occasional resident looking down. Some with the front pages of Charlie Hebdo and Liberation cut out and pasted on to the iron grilling on their balconies as tributes. It seemed like perhaps this was the way the end of World War Two must have felt: not all joy. Joy and insecurity. Death and insecurity mixed with a collective will to turn the page. A measured celebration.
The crowd began thinning out and allowed me the time to collect my sense of personal space back. That was until a red haired homeless man with a sharp beard, had a huge grin on his face and begun swinging himself around with his large backpack. He came close to whacking others wit it. He couldn't help it he said. On a day like this he was giddy. Normally, he is the only vagrant in a crowd, but today we were all vagrants. "I'm sorry" he apologized as he spun around. "I'm just a grain of sand", he kept repeating in French. "This day is not about you being a grain of sand monsieur", I felt like telling him. This day is about us all being the beach together so stop swinging your backpack around. But in the interest of solidarity, I held my tongue as everyone else seemed to be doing the same.
We got to the Pére Lechaise cemetary and I looked up to see an American flag draped from a balcony. I saw some girls were drinking and smoking above a sign that read in English "We are Charlie" over the flag. It seemed a half assed effort. If these girls really wanted to be Charlie, they'd be out in this parade with the rest of us. Tortoise shell armored cops were visible at the crossroads. They looked on vigilantly. But there was no fear in their eyes. Before we got to Nation, the sun was setting. The cold began to creep into our jacket sleeves. I understood a few things about these marches. It was good to be a part of a mass. It doesn't feel logical but the French have these worked into their DNA so we had been in good hands. It was good to feel that kind of trust in one's fellow man if only for a moment.
Along the cafés of the Boulevard, the youth of the banlieu were still looking on curiously. "Look at all these Charlies", they said. Even if they were not on the march, I think they could recognize that it was good to see people caring about an idea again. It was good to break the cliché of the western shopper, thinking of only what he is going to buy in the January sales and actually commit himself as much to an idea as those that shot the cartoonist had committed to theirs. And for a brief moment, in this fractured society that is Paris, perhaps I smelt the slightest whiff of respect.
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