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Despite President Emmanuel’s Macron’s recent attempts to unite his nation, this Saturday will see central Paris again on lock-down, with riot police once more aiming to tamp down any violence from the Gilet jaunes protestors. France’s “yellow vests” first took to the streets of Paris on November 17, ostensibly opposed to green fuel-tax rises introduced to make driving more expensive. Many motorists balked at having to pay more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, in protest, they donned the hi-vis vests that all cars in France must carry. The demands from the Gilet jaunes movement then morphed, partly driven by a Macron-must-resign groundswell.
France has a long and fabled history of street protest. Paris, in particular, has deep associations with revolutionary foment with many of its famously wide boulevards being designed not so much for the easier passage of wheeled vehicles but to prevent the sort of mob control that fuelled the French Revolution of 1789 and later protests in 1830 and 1848.
The sweeping, majestic boulevards of Paris were created between 1853 and 1870 by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, popularly known as Baron Haussmann. Acting under the instructions of Napoleon III, Haussmann flattened much of medieval and revolutionary Paris to create his wide, straight, long boulevards. Dramatic-looking, yes, but the widths and straightness were not provided for the pleasure of carriage drivers. Air circulation for health, and the desire to be grander than London were part of the plan but crowd control was a significant impetus. Narrow roads can be easily blocked by erecting barricades.
While some of the Champs Elysées is today surfaced with oblong granite setts, the road was surfaced initially with compacted crushed stone, surfacing known as macadam after its Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam. The use of macadam instead of cobblestones, setts or tarred-wooden blocks, reduced the availability of ready-made missiles and fire-starters.
At the time, Mark Twain said Haussmann’s wide, straight roads were a sop to Napoleon’s plans for his own safety:
He is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an arrow – avenues which a cannonball could traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than the flesh and bones of men – boulevards whose stately edifices will never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented revolution breeders. The mobs used to riot there, but they must seek another rallying point in future. And this ingenious Napoleon paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition of asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flagstones – no more assaulting his majesty’s troops with cobbles.
Much to Haussman’s annoyance, his grandiose urban planning didn’t stop the insurrection of 1871 that led to the Paris Commune, a socialistic government that briefly ruled Paris in the spring of that year.
Haussmann’s city makeover didn’t stop this mini-revolution, partly because the street-widening plan was yet to be finished. Many roads were still narrow and surfaced with tarred wooden blocks, which the insurrectionists used as weapons, in bonfires, and barricades. Victor Hugo, chronicling the 1830 revolution in his novel Les Misérables, wrote: “The barricade was built with setts … Not a stone out of line …”
That’s right, the barricades used in the modern stage production of Les Misérables are historically inaccurate: the actual barricades were made from oblong roadstones, not wooden furniture.
And it’s these setts – a later addition to the Paris street scene and not a surfacing commissioned by Haussmann – which on Saturday will be plucked from the ground and thrown at riot police by the yellow vests.