Sometimes French directness makes a point better than Anglo-Saxon reserve, especially if you can make it rhyme. One of the many combative banners on the International Women’s Day demonstration in Nice read: “Ta main sur mon cul, mon poing dans ta gueule!” (“Your hand on my bottom, my fist in your mouth!”)
The march, conservatively estimated by the daily newspaper Nice-Matin at 1,000 people, had almost as many different banners. Though well-behaved and good-humoured, its politics were fierce.
You seldom see a demonstration so welcomed by passers-by, who stood and watched admiringly and sang along with some of the songs. Nice-Matin devoted much of that day’s issue to the rights of women, with an article about the Gisèle Pelicot rape case occupying almost all of the first two pages. The scene of the crimes, Mazan, is a long way from Nice, but the sense of shock is nationwide.
Marchers politely stopped to allow pedestrians to cross the road, and as I pushed my 11-month-old granddaughter across in her pram, a female demonstrator said to me: “Le soleil est dans ses yeux” (“The sun is in her eyes”). I thanked her and adjusted the shade. Her banner read: “Pour en finir avec l’oppression des femmes it faut abattre le capitalisme.” (“To end the oppression of women, we must end capitalism.”) Yet the Cote d’Azur is a stronghold of the extreme right wing Rassemblement Nationale (RN). Were the marchers in enemy territory?
Some thought so. One banner proclaimed: “L’extrême droite – ennemi des droits de femmes.” (“The extreme right, enemy of the rights of women.”) Several marchers wore a sign saying “Engagée, enragée” produced by La Parti Syndicaliste. Syndicalists believe trade unions can create a socialist society – a view just about still tenable in France, whose unions did not go through the experience of Thatcherism.
The march was organised by the trade unions. Where in Britain there is just one trade union centre, the Trades Unions Congress, France has five big trade union centres and several smaller ones, which remain divided by politics.
Three of the more left wing of them took the lead in organising the demonstration: Union Syndicale Solidaires, the syndicalists; Fédération Syndicale Unitaire (FSU), the majority of whose 160,000 members are teachers; and the biggest in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail, with historic links to the French Communist Party.
They see the extreme right as the enemy. “Le nombre de femmes seduit par l’extrême droite est en sensible hausse” (“The number of women seduced by the extreme right has significantly increased”), proclaimed the FSU’s manifesto for the day. The arrival of Marine le Pen as RN leader in 2011 gave it a falsely feminised image, they say, and her party is “un ennemi qui vous veut du mal” (“an enemy that wishes you harm”).
In public at least, the RN concentrates its fire upon Muslims, noting that Nice has the second-highest number of radical Muslims after the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Flashpoints proliferate. Currently there’s a battle over planning permission for a mosque in the nearby town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, whose RN deputy, Bryan Masson, says there has been insufficient effort to establish the views of residents.
Putting it in the heart of a residential area and close to two schools will make for nuisances in terms of parking, of movement, and of “tranquillité pour les riverains” (“peace for the residents”), says Masson.
Still, in the gentle spring sunshine, the demonstrators ambled amiably along Nice’s wonderful seafront, the Promenade des Anglais; past the first few sunseekers on the stony beach, a very few of whom were even swimming; past a group of half a dozen men and women on their backs on exercise mats, stretching in unison. The promenade’s many joggers overtook the marchers.
They went down the Boulevard Jean Jaurès, named after a revered French socialist who was murdered in 1914 by an assassin inspired by the far right group Action Française. They turned into the Place Garibaldi, the vast square whose name and 18th-century baroque elegance reminds us that Nice is at least as much an Italian city as a French one.
There, demonstrators gathered around a group of seven women and two men singing rousing feminist songs. There were no speeches. They were not needed.
Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian
