Notes & Queries response: Why are the French so much more militant than the British?

image generated by Craiyon

That night Hôpital arrondissement smelled of fig blossom. The perfume seemed to cling to still, night-time air as if it were dependent on the darkness for its survival, and would be dispelled by the daylight. I first noticed it after we emerged from the Metro, transitioning from neon clubland, buried in our recent past, several miles to south-west, and into leafy Parisian suburbs. The scent of it was still on my dishevelled clothing the following morning. One of the delegates who rode the hotel elevator with me to the ground floor wrinkled his nose when I got in.

“You have visited Hôpital,” he said. He asked me whether I had friends in the district. When I answered in the affirmative, he listed off some names, none of whom I knew.

Allain's half-brother had a place there. He had inherited it from a uncle who he hated and regarded as a traitor.

“Will he be okay with us turning up at his door at this hour?” I enquired.

“He is an anarchist,” answered Allain. “Normal conventions of time mean nothing to him. He will have only recently got up. Anyway, we are only going there to smoke weed. If there is a bad crowd, then we will take some back to our place. The children should be asleep by now.”

“Lucie will have them down,” confirmed Grete.

I had started an affair with her a few days before. We walked together a few feet behind Allain.

“When Wallrock issued their Eden Retirement Bond, in 1992, they gave everyone who invested a pygmy fig as a gift,” she said. “It only flowers after twenty-five years, around the same time the bond matures. Everybody in this area invested. If you had the money, you were a fool not to. When the plants began flowering it was a novelty at first. People held dinner parties to celebrate. Now everyone is sick of it.”

“Why don't you all just get rid of the plants?” I asked.

She tightened her grip on my hand in a manner that made me think I had annoyed her. Allain either hadn't noticed our physical closeness, or he didn't care.

“What if the value of the bond suddenly goes down, or there is some financial scandal? We are held prisoner by superstition.”

Soon after, we were joined by Trichet and Lajoie. They came out from one of the side-streets, half jogging to catch up. Grete and I heard the sound of their feet on the road and we both thought the same thing – that we were about to be mugged.

“You are heading to Bisset's place?” enquired Trichet, breathlessly.

“Will he be there?” asked Allain

“You haven't heard. He is a fucking cripple for the next few months,” said Trichet. “A few nights ago he set his trainers on fire trying to throw a Molotov cocktail. Now he has big bandages on both feet. I am supposed to feed his fish.”

“His feet look like a pair footballs,” said Lajoie. “I keep wanting to kick them.”

“You should not act on those thoughts,” advised Trichet.

image generated by Craiyon

I did not like the man. A few evenings before we had, at his insistence, gone out on the town together. It had turned into a night of fractured bar-hopping, sometimes leaving mid-drink and once when the drinks had only just arrived. We had ended up in a pigeon coop on the roof of a brothel in Pigalle. A man named Roy, pulled back a bird-shit spattered, doubled-over tarpaulin to reveal a francing machine underneath.

“There are three grades of notes,” he casually informed us, bringing out samples. “These you should be careful where you spend. These are a gamble – fifty-fifty.”

“Fifty cents on the Euro?” said Trichet.

“Sixty. There are secondary expenses to be taken care of. These you can spend wherever you like.”

“Eighty cents on the Euro?”

“Eighty-five cents. We have to pay off people in the banks. You are still getting a good deal.”

Trichet purchased small bundles of the middle and top grade notes. He placed them in separate wallets. Another man who was with us bought a larger bundle. He had his back to us when he made the transaction so I could not see what he walked away with.

“The people who invited me to Paris would object,” I said, when the offer was made.

Roy nodded. “You are part of the delegation? You would be surprised.”

After this exchange, Trichet acted like he had something on me. He became more offhand. He would sometimes lightly push me with his fist, in a manner that was meant to appear friendly. I saw him do it to other people he did not respect. Under the pretence of acquiring smaller bills, he attempted to exchange one of his fraudulent one-hundred Euro notes with me. I don't think it was even one of the good ones. I told him to change it at the bar.

“Where have you been tonight?” enquired Allain.

“Cave Sous La Seine,” said Trichet. “Soulier and his band were hitting it hard. They had another drummer besides Soulier – a Nigerian called Bouhouche. He was in Paris a few years ago but he overstayed on his visa.”

“With a name like Bouhouche, all you can be is a jazz player,” said Grete.

“He plays with heavy mahogany sticks,” said Trichet. “Soulier was playing with birch sticks; his usual fiddly rhythm. There was a moment when the drum patterns forked and took different paths. Some of the players went with Soulier, some went with Bouhouche. Suddenly there were two separate bands on-stage improvising with each other.”

“It sounds chaotic,” said Allain.

“You know what brought the two sides back together? A muffled foghorn on the Seine. Wathelet answered it with his trumpet and the band fell in line behind him.”

~

“Ten years ago I would have fought this man in the street. Now we embrace like comrades,” said Bisset. From his corner of the settee, he threw an arm around Allain's midriff. His bandaged feet and lower legs stuck-out stiffly in front on him, like a pair of over-wrapped golf clubs.

“You politics have aligned,” I remarked. The weed was having a fogging effect on my brain. It was a struggle not to ramble in conversation.

“It is complicated,” said Allain.

“It really is not,” said Bisset. “I am a part of the agitant class. You have no comparison in the United Kingdom, but it is easily explained.”

He rolled up the unbuttoned cuffs of his shirt sleeves. The words 'Toujours Agitateur' were tattooed down both forearms.

“I hit with my left and my right hand.”

“But you are militant socialist? Communist?”

“Neither. It goes back to the seventeen hundreds when the peasants were mired in poverty. My family, and thousands of others like them, were leasing small plots of land from wealthier peasants. The rents were going up all the time. There were steep taxes on bread and salt. Finally, the people who had been thrown off the land and disenfranchised formed themselves into a revolutionary army. During the revolution my ancestors released rats into the bell towers of the churches to stir the chimes and call people out onto the streets. Over two-hundred years later, I do the same thing.”

“So for you the French Revolution never ended,” I said. “You have yet to achieve your goals.”

“For the agitant class, the goal is permanent upheaval,” answered Bisset. “I was born into the revolution and I will die with the fighting still going on around me. In a sense I am true progressive. If the government is on the right, then we are on the left and vice versa. If the government is central we make trouble until the alliance falls apart. We move the left foot forward and then the right. France marches onwards.”

“While you are moving the feet, who is taking care of the eyes and looking ahead,” I asked. “It is easy to march off a clifftop, or into a brick wall.”

“The parties set the course. We are there to break the political monotony. Nobody can relax.”

“It sounds exhausting,” I said. “And this is your family tradition. You were, as you say 'born into it.'”

“It is more formal than that,” said Allain. “The agitant class is recognised under French law. You may have seen the cordoned areas at the demonstrations.”

“Poseurs!” scoffed Bisset. “Paper revolutionaries! The police fake arrest them. They take them around the corner then let them go. It is a scripted dance.”

He pointed at himself.

image generated by Craiyon

“Here is the real deal. You have seen the overbridges that cross the avenues and boulevards? They are for the ordinary people who want to avoid the street protests. For my family they are a forbidden city. I can never legally set foot on those bridges at anytime. I crossed over one once, in the back of an ambulance.”

Trichet returned from the pond in the private garden. When he handed me a glass of wine, his fingers smelled strongly of fish flakes.

“You think it is out of character for a revolutionary to own a koi pond?” said Bisset through an idle cloud of smoke. He narrowed his eyes like a dozing retitle. “They are burred specimens that no one wants. If I didn't take them, then they would be killed.”

Across the room, Grete was dozing on a chaise longue. She had slumped over a little. Her head was tilted back over the carved rosewood frame.

A woman called Éliane was standing with Lajoie over by the tall windows.

“Where is the hospital?” she enquired.

“Over there, where the lights are, but it is no longer a hospital. It is apartments for lawyers.”

~

The car inched from the underground hotel car park and onto the Le Boulevard de L'Armée en Lambeaux, into a slowly closing gap between the police and the protestors. Through the tinted glass, I could see both sides, far off in the distance, moving towards each other. From the left-rear passenger window the protestors were an abstract collage of colour and sound; drums and air-horns. Looking across the dark pinstripe of Prins' suit, through the opposite window, the police were a dark shifting mass, silently moving through formation drills.

“The tide is coming in,” observed Prins. “An hour from now, this will all be chaos and broken glass.”

Behind us the steel shutters of the garage came down and automatically locked in place.

The driver stalled at the top of the ramp.

“I would like to be out of here before then,” said Prins.

From the river, I heard the sound of a foghorn.

I hope this is of help.

image generated by Craiyon

~

This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 26th March, 2023.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.