Manifestation!

The French take to the street at the slightest provocation.  It is a grand French tradition it seems.  Demonstrations, and riot police, are a common sight around here.  Possibly more so where we live because we are not far from the national assembly.  I could have had some great photos for this post if I had had the camera at the right moments.  One day last week there was a line of white police trucks with flashing blue lights as far as one could see down boulevard Saint-Germain, while around the corner rue de Solférino was completely barricaded by demonstrators.  I believe that they were railway workers protesting the proposed privatisation of some minor part of the SNCF.  It was the first time that the noise of a street demonstration could be clearly heard from our apartment.  In general, in preparing Silke and Jerome for getting around Paris by themselves, we had to discuss strategies for finding alternate routes in case where you want to go is blocked by a demonstration (never try to force your way through one), or a metro line is not running due to a wildcat strike, or more mundanely just because of mechanical failure.  (Or more gruesomely, suicide-by-metro, which I am told statistically exceeds service interruptions due to strikes.)

Friday Silke and Jerome had a more personal and direct experience on this subject.  They arrived at the Lycée to find a huge crowd, and the huge front doors blocked by a mountain of green garbage bins.  Standing on the mountain of garbage bins, dragged from the surrounding streets no doubt, people were yelling and chanting.  (I mean that the garbage bins were dragged from the surrounding streets, not that the people were.  It wasn't another Revolution or St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.)  The Lycéans were protesting!  Actually it is a rather sad case that was the cause of this demonstration and others at Lycées across France.  The police had stopped a bus of students on a school trip, and removed a girl whose family, illegally resident in France, was being deported to Kosovo.  The family were Roma - I suppose we would say Gypsy in English.  This is a very fraught and complicated issue, since there are a large Roma communities in France that are not well integrated, to say the least.  The young pick-pocket children who swarm tourists at Châtelet/Les Halles, and the women at the metro stations selling discarded but still valid metro tickets at discount prices, are identifiably Roma.  This family it seems were however well-integrated, had been here five years, and the girl, of Lycéan age, was attending school (which is not always the case) and doing well, speaking perfect French.  The insensitive, even outrageous, action of the police in stopping the school bus to remove the girl provoked these large demonstrations.  It made the front page of le Monde on Friday.  For Silke and Jerome, who aren't in the habit of reading le Monde in the morning, it was a little bit unexpected, if no longer bewildering - they're been in Paris too long for that.  The collegians, who are between Jerome and Silke's ages, were not expected to be participating in the demonstrations by the older Lycéan students, but getting access to the school was difficult because the only other door, a small entrance to the side of the great main doors, was also blocked.  After some negotiation, the demonstrators agreed to allow collegians to enter.  The youngest, Jerome's age, were gathered into classes and escorted through a class at a time.  Older students had to make their way through themselves.  Or not - some students from 3ème whom Silke encountered asked her not to mention that she saw them.  They preferred to have the day off it seems.  One of Silke's classmates who did go in (they nearly all did) was very slightly injured, accidentally I'm sure.  The teachers took care to explain the reasons and the motivations for the demonstration - they were not unsympathetic to it, and one saw fit to add that there was no fear of damage to the doors, because the school has their own barrier of wooden beams that are set up "on occasions like this" to protect the doors.  Another teacher - or perhaps the same one, I don't know - observed that these kind of things did tend to happen more frequently just before school vacations.  (School vacations did just start this week - see previous post.)  For anyone inside the school, lunch at the school restaurant was free on Friday.

Anyway, as I tell Silke and Jerome, we are here in Paris so that they can get a broad education.