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"On my balcony, hatred": the testimony of a reader of Figaro after the violence in Paris

2023-03-24T18:53:20.402Z


FIGAROVOX / MOOD – Philippe Marty, a faithful reader of Figaro, was in Paris on March 23, when numerous violence punctuated the rally against the pension reform. He tells what he saw.


New day of protest.

Right in the heart of the city, on my balcony, I have a ringside seat.

Unlike the previous ones, today a hundred demonstrators dressed in black, hooded, masked, open the march.

I observe them, impressed to see them elsewhere than behind my television set.

No pension slogans.

I feel like this is going to go wrong.

I do not understand why the CGT, just behind, agrees to be guided by this group which exudes radicality.

Sporadic three or four black umbrellas open, masking a small group of hooded ninjas swooping down on a trade.

Destroy it.

And quietly return to the ranks.

People watch.

The police cannot intervene without risking causing a crowd movement.

So she does nothing.

The other demonstrators stay, sometimes laugh at this vandalism which they understand because “yes but still…”.

Behind a guy who has a loudspeaker in his hand is screaming

“Everybody hates the police!”

, taken up in chorus by hundreds of high school demonstrators.

If Parnurge existed, he would revel in this flock that seems to forget why they are there.

Once again, the police do nothing.

I'm on the balcony, I watch them being insulted, being humiliated.

As if the contempt of agent had received a special dispensation for this demonstration.

Today at 5 p.m., leaving school, my children could not return home.

Without our being able to reach them, they arrived in a neighborhood under siege.

Philip Marty

And then suddenly it goes away.

The first throwing of stones, the trash cans kissing each other, the bus shelters exploding, the terraces devastated to supply the barricades that are being put in place.

And there… right there, the CRS intervene, gas those who remain, charge to avoid being injured.

To avoid being hurt… I'm on my balcony.

I can clearly see that the demonstrators who remained without breaking anything are among the gassed.

But they stayed.

And close to those who break.

Yes, at this moment, they must run away castigating a police response which they take for violence while endorsing those of the thugs.

Because “yes but still…”.

I receive on my phone the first images of news channels that have union officials and leaders talking about

extreme left who flood France with their sophisms that many end up believing by only talking about police violence and state responsibility.

But no.

I am on my balcony.

I don't see police officers attacking, I see police officers defending themselves.

I don't see any social struggle.

I see crazy people.

I see them tearing up curbs, I see them stealing umbrellas to burn them, I see them destroying for pleasure, I see them in a trance.

I do not hear any claim on pensions.

I hear hate.

Hate against our democracy, against the bourgeois (some of whom are in the process of demonstrating without knowing that they are defending a radical movement that wants their skin), against the firefighters, who are still on strike, who are trying somehow to put out the fires,

against small traders, against you who read these lines… Make no mistake about it.

These people hate you.

To say that we condemn this violence but that we understand because “yes but all the same…”, is to legitimize this violence.

This hate.

This rage.

Never again will I use this phrase: “yes but still…”.

Not after what I saw from my balcony…

Read also“Postponement of the arrival of Charles III or humiliated France”

Today I took a slap.

Not a small slap.

Today at 5 p.m., leaving school, my children could not return home.

Without our being able to reach them, they arrived in a neighborhood under siege.

Without electricity, and without a telephone network, after ringing the bell desperately at the door of the building, in front of flames, insults, violence, without response, they had to flee just before a crowd movement with uncertain consequences.

Flee from this hatred that we must stop legitimizing.

Flee fear in the stomach in front of this pack of crazy people who have lost all sense of reality.

Run away at 6 years old.

Running away at 9 years old.

Today I couldn't reassure my daughters by putting them to bed, with the sound of sirens still howling.

When my 9-year-old daughter asked me what democracy was, I couldn't think of anything else to say to her, with the retinal persistence of my balcony, that if we weren't in a democracy, today these people like that would probably be dead or in jail for 30 years or more for doing what they did on the street.

In a democracy, they start again next Tuesday… Perhaps it would be good to remind us of this in these difficult times before our children begin to dream of a dictatorship which would protect them.

Source: lefigaro

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