Macron's Peterloo

Since the beginning of the Gilets jaunes protests in November, reports Liberation, 93 protesters have been seriously injured by the French police, 13 of whom have been blinded in one eye by the careless use of ‘flashballs’. 

Press reports are showing pictures this morning of police being issued with automatic assault rifles. It can surely now be only a matter of time before the police shoot dead their fellow Frenchmen and women. Older readers may recall the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, in which four protesting students were killed by the National Guard, and which traumatised a nation. And many more younger people in the UK today will draw a direct parallel to the Peterloo massacre in 1819, at which 11 were killed by Yeomanry. Mike Leigh released a film about it last year; few would imagine that Macron now fills the role played by William Hulton two hundred years ago. 

There are strong parallels between the democratic disempowerment that motivated both the Peterloo protesters and the Gilets jaunes; as we have often remarked, ordinary people are the losers from a globalism that has seen

• Increasing inequality
• Living standards down
• People excluded from decision making
• Decline of working class power
• Globalism / AI causing disempowerment
• Cultural loss – damage to cultural identity

Street protest is the French way. In Britain we have been lucky in that parliaments and governments have usually eventually listened to the voices of the people before blood was spilled. But Peterloo was an exception. Let’s hope and pray that we don’t breed our own Macron here -  a violent and authoritarian man prepared to do anything to retain power – nor ever again see a Peterloo.