Furious French raid kitchen cupboards to send Macron a noisy message

 

Furious French raid kitchen cupboards to send Macron a noisy message

 

The tradition of bashing pots and pans in protest has been revived, with ministers facing a cookware cacophony across the country

 

Kim Willsher in Paris

Sun 23 Apr 2023 10.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/23/french-message-macron-pots-and-pans-protest

 

The French have turned protesting into an art form. A country synonymous with revolution has given the world the “manure protest”, where tonnes of muck were dumped outside parliament; the “vegetable protest”, with carrots and rotten tomatoes spread on the steps of public buildings; and the “dairy protest”, in which gallons of milk were spilled. Earlier this month, opponents of Emmanuel Macron’s bill to raise the state pension age to 64 dumped gas and electricity meters outside Marseilles city hall.

 

For the past week, furious French people have revived a much older form of protest: the casserolade, or “pots and pans protest”, after Macron pushed through the unpopular law.

 

Last Monday, the country was supposed to be glued to the television to watch the president’s speech, his first since he signed the pension bill into law. Instead, in Paris’ northern 10th arrondissement, people took to the streets with saucepans, frying pans, lids, metal colanders and a variety of spoons. At least two children waved metal flan dishes.

 

“Macron isn’t listening to us, so we’re not going to listen to him,” said one woman, bashing a battered pan with a metal spoon. “Not only are we not listening to him, we’re symbolically drowning him out. Pots and pans are the tools of working people so it’s entirely appropriate.” It was a simple idea and soon caught on. In the following days, wherever Macron turned up for an official visit, he was greeted with a cacophony of kitchen utensils.

 

In the town of Ganges in southern France, police were reported to have confiscated saucepans after the local authorities invoked the penal code to justify a ban on “portable sound devices”. This caused even more of a political racket, and the interior ministry was forced to issue a denial that there was a blanket ban on saucepans at protests.

 

Soon, every visiting minister was greeted by a saucepan symphony: public accounts minister Gabriel Attal received a “concert de casseroles” in Pau in the south-west, as did health minister François Braun in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburbs, and prime minister Élisabeth Borne in the Indre, central France.

 

Pan bashing dates back to the Middle Ages, when it was a folk custom called charivari, intended to shame a member of the community who was considered to have done wrong or was disapproved of for violating community norms. This included older men who preferred much younger women, wife-beaters, adulterers and unmarried mothers. In England, the practice was often known as tin-panning.

 

As a political protest, the practice of banging pots and pans dates from the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe I whose reign, from 1830 to 1848, was bookended by revolutions. During that period, republican French objected to their bourgeois rulers with pot and pan protests.

 

In the early 1960s, Algerians demanding independence from France demonstrated with kitchen utensils against Paris’s violent repression of the population. In the opposing camp, French nationals in Algeria hostile to General de Gaulle’s policy of self-determination for Algeria also took up pots and pans.

 

A decade later, the tactic was adopted in Chile, where upper middle-class women began banging on their kitchenware as a symbolic protest against food shortages under President Salvador Allende. The utensils were taken up again in 1983 against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which shows that both left and right have a propensity for kitchenware demonstrations.

 

Since then, protesters in Argentina, Quebec, Catalonia, Venezuela, Colombia, Burkina Faso and Senegal have followed the tradition. In 2017, France’s radical left leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, organised about 120 saucepan protests across France.

 

Last week, Macron, who has also had eggs hurled at him, told crowds: “Eggs and saucepans are used in the kitchen in my home.” He insisted that hitting saucepans “isn’t going to take France forward”.

 

The latter comment sparked a Twitter response from high-end stainless steel saucepan maker Cristel. It posted: “Monsieur le Président, we make pans that do take France forward.”

 

In a speech drowned out by saucepan bangers, Macron said he had given himself and his government 100 days – until Bastille Day on 14 July – to come up with concrete improvements to French people’s lives as quid pro quo for the painful pension reform.

 

The unions, the opposition and a majority of people, angered not only by the bill but also by the way special constitutional powers were used to push it through parliament, have vowed to keep protesting. The next day of action, 1 May, will be a test of both sides’ determination.

 

At the demonstration outside the town hall in the 10th arrondissement last Monday, one British visitor told how they would have to work until 67 to collect their state pension.

 

“Ah … perhaps you need to be more French,” came the reply.