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Macron’s collusion with COVID has not destroyed France’s spirit
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Date: None

Aux arts mes citoyen-ne-s! That play on the chorus line in France’s national anthem, “To arms, citizens!”, was on the banner hanging over a general assembly of the artists and theatre workers of Marseilles, who have been occupying two of the city’s main theatres since mid-March. On 25 March, more than 80 theatres and cultural centres around France were being occupied in a movement kicked off at the start of the month in Odeon Theatre in the heart of Paris by members of the left-wing trade union confederation, the CGT.

In a handful of cases, the authorities have intervened to end the occupations. As they have done so, other theatres have joined the movement.

For the assembly, some hundred-plus activists had come together from the Criée, in a former fish auction house on the waterfront of the Marseilles’ Old Port, and the Merlan theatre, created some 40 years ago in one of the city’s densely packed neighbourhoods of concrete flats after the police killing of a local man.

They are both public theatres dedicated to cultural creativity and consolidating links between that inventiveness and the communities around them, a particularly hard task when faced with the shutdown imposed under the government’s epidemic requirements, which rule out reopening theatres even with proper distancing and protection procedures.

Worse, on 1 July, welfare changes that will cut unemployment pay for some jobseekers – pushed through by President Emmanuel Macron just before the start of last year’s spring lockdown – will finally come into operation. Many theatre workers, actors, technicians and support staff, like other cultural employees in France, work under an unemployment benefit regime known as ‘intermittence’, which takes account of their irregularity of employment but still leaves them poorly paid. They will be particularly hard hit by the changes.

The occupation at the Criée is serious, well controlled and run on strict COVID hygiene principles. None of which rules out high hopes or vigorous debate on how to achieve their aims. The theatre occupiers confronted the key challenge: how could they reach out to other vulnerable workers paying the price for Macron’s approach to the epidemic? They hope to stay in occupation until any epidemic restrictions are lifted.

France – a social tinderbox

The Saturday before the assembly, there had been a large street rally in Marseille against the Global Security Law of interior minister Gérald Darmanin. On the Sunday, a street festival of many thousands saw that minister’s head in effigy was paraded on a chariot to the jeers of thousands.

Not everyone joined the festival to make a political point. Some used it as an occasion to create mayhem or publicly refuse to wear the obligatory face masks. Marseille’s Socialist Party mayor, Benoît Payan, spoke of “the egoism of a few irresponsible people” after some urinated at the spot where eight died as their decrepit, aging homes collapsed upon them in 2018 – a catastrophe that triggered the popular movement that gave the Left control of Marseille’s town hall in 2020.

Nihilism is not the spirit of the theatre occupations nor the street protests by cultural workers. They are enlivened by the singer and activist HK with his new composition ‘We want to dance again’ – the version he took to a demonstration by Marseille hospital workers mobilised by the CGT in January. Now the anthem for this ‘Aux arts mes citoyen-ne-s’ movement, his song’s lyrics are about opposition to the creeping authoritarianism and austerity of Macron’s regime, not a rejection of hygiene rules.

On 12 March, the actor Corrine Masiero, made headlines by going naked at the Césars, France’s version of the Oscars, in protest over Macron’s slow strangulation of the cultural sector. Currently participating in the occupation of her theatre in the northern town of Lille, she has used HK’s anthem to structure a video protest over the president’s treatment of the hospital system.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/macrons-collusion-with-covid-has-not-destroyed-frances-spirit/