Bloquons tout

The idea that France should be shut down by popular consensus, as a protest against the budget proposals of Macron’s prime minister François Bayrou, and above all against Macron himself, was launched on a Telegram account in July. At the time, Bayrou was failing to drive an austerity budget through the National Assembly. He was preoccupied by the country’s annual deficit and so was Brussels: it was running at 5.8 per cent of GDP, well above the 3 per cent limit set by the EU’s stability and growth pact, which France has crashed for years. Voters on the left and the far right didn’t like Bayrou’s proposed cuts in public provision.

In May a small group that called itself ‘Les essentiels France’ had nominated 10 September as the day to bring France to a standstill, ‘no more resignation, no more division’. On 11 July a video posted by a separate source on TikTok came up with the same date. But it was only when Bayrou set out his measures on 15 July, including the now notorious suggestion that two national holidays should be abolished in the name of growth, that the plan gained traction across social media. On 1 August a message on Telegram reiterated the date with the words ‘on bloque tout.’ There was now something resembling a movement. And it had a name: ‘Bloquons tout.’ But would it have political purchase on the day?

Estimates for Wednesday’s turnout, nationwide, were between 190,000 and 250,000. The government deployed 80,000 gendarmes and police, roughly one for every three demonstrators. There were newsworthy clashes in Paris (briefly), Lyon and Rennes, but there was also a mood of exhilaration, in spite of the anger signalled on social media and the widespread feeling that enough is enough (‘ras le bol’). Students predominated in many of the big cities. Not much was shut down, and when it was, disruption was short-lived.

Many participants hoped that they could roll momentum forward, across the weekend, until the major day of action scheduled by the unions for 18 September, but if this seems unlikely, they can always regard their outing on Wednesday as a warm-up for a far larger show of contestation next week. The conviviality on show at the Bloquons tout protests will not outlast the incremental fury that has been building since Macron abolished the wealth tax in 2017. He is scorned by the demonstrators as a paragon of injustice and incomprehension who should be forced out of office if he won’t resign.

There’s resonance here with the gilets jaunes, who also had a loathing for Macron. But Bloquons tout is (or was) a different phenomenon. I attended several of the gilets jaunes’ demonstrations in Paris and Bordeaux, one of their major rallying points. In Bordeaux this week there were few groupings I remembered from the earlier movement. The social composition of Bloquons tout is different – younger and (in Bordeaux at least) less obviously down at heel. One of the early proposals for 10 September was a mass stayaway, which may be why the proponents of the movement settled on a weekday. The gilets jaunes – whose precarious livelihoods determined their calendar of action – could neither stay away nor protest on the streets during the working week.

As it happened, the online journal Mediapart discovered a handful of gilets jaunes in Bloquons tout during the planning stages, most of them tending to the right. It also transpired that Les essentiels was launched by an idiosyncratic sovereigntist-cum-localist and keen Frexiteer in a village west of Lille, who has little time for party politics and less for parties on the left. These were tricky associations for the trade unions, even though they had come to repent a missed opportunity in the heyday of the gilets jaunes. In the end only two – the CGT (despite early misgivings) and Solidaires – took up with the protesters.

By the time people were congregating on Wednesday morning, it was clear that this was a militant left protest. The Jean Jaurès Foundation, a think tank with Socialist Party leanings, had already done the homework, saturating the relevant groups on Facebook and Telegram with questionnaires and aggregating the replies (more than a thousand). When respondents were asked which way they voted in round one of the 2022 presidentials, it turned out that 69 per cent had gone for Mélenchon (La France Insoumise), compared to 22 per cent of all French voters; 3 per cent for Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National), compared to 23 per cent; and 2 per cent for Macron, compared to 28 per cent.

Only 27 per cent said they had been involved in the gilets jaunes movement. Some, I guess, would have been too young: 22 per cent are in high school or further education, or unemployed (compared to 12 per cent of the population). Only 6 per cent describe themselves as workers (‘ouvriers’); 27 per cent have spent five years or longer in further education, compared to 10 per cent of the relevant population as a whole. Only 6 per cent trust the media, compared to 32 per cent nationwide. This adamant strand of the left will be conspicuous in the crowds on 18 September.

Seven prime ministers have come – and six gone – in as many years since Macron took office. The pace of the turnover has increased since he called snap legislative elections last year, from which the left alliance, or Nouveau Front Populaire, emerged with more seats in the National Assembly than the Rassemblement National or Macron’s Ensemble. But Macron doggedly refused to a name a prime minister from the left. Gabriel Attal, the prime minister in place during the ballot, offered his resignation after the results were in. Macron hesitated and finally accepted, but Attal and his ministers stayed on for another seven weeks or so – the longest spell since 1945 that a disabled caretaker government has dragged out its days in parliament.

Next Macron appointed Michel Barnier, the ‘moron from the Alps’ as his political rivals call him. In theory, he was the figure least likely to be sent packing by a vote of no confidence from the National Assembly, but his social security budget plan, deplored by Le Pen’s MPs and the remains of the fractious left alliance, brought him down. He resigned after 99 days in office. To Macron’s mind the only figure left standing was François Bayrou, who quickly took an aggressive position on public finances – not just the annual deficit, but long-term sovereign debt. ‘Every second,’ he announced in July, as Bloquons tout sharpened their counter-offensive, ‘France’s national debt increases by five thousand euros.’

This was typical of the Micawberish, 74-year-old sage from a village in the Pyrenees – the author of popular histories about the Wars of Religion and Henri IV – who ascended through the nebulous centre of French politics like an air balloon with no one in the basket, until he founded his own party in 2007. His call to arms against all forms of public debt set the scene for another round of contestation (France last defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1797).

In August Bayrou asked the National Assembly for a vote of confidence, knowing he was likely to be another of Macron’s sacrificial goats. The count, held on 8 September, went against him and he threw in the towel the day before Bloquons tout’s show of exuberance. Bayrou’s resignation was neither here nor there to them; he was sure to be replaced by another of Macron’s drones. Our latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, is a discreet man of the right, flexible by his own account, but already under a cloud of suspicion. His promise to revisit the question of retirement age after it rose from to 62 to 64 under Attal’s predecessor, Elisabeth Borne, has not played well with the trade union movement.

Who can take this new prime minister at his word and who, in the restless, divided National Assembly, can countenance another last-ditch appointee signed off by the president? A negotiable politics between the entrenched parties of right and left, on the one hand, and the legatees of a dying technocratic tradition, on the other, is running out of time. Lecornu’s term as Macron’s seventh prime minister may well be the last throw.