The weather in France

While I was a student in Paris back in 1994, I witnessed a series of riots over some proposed shifts to minimum wage. Students, mostly, burned cars and looted shops all around the 14th arrondisement, where I was living in an international student dormitory. Young and fearless as I was at the time, I grabbed my camera and set out to document the action, and got teargassed and hit with a billy club in the process before retreating to my room.

I remember thinking at the time that the notion of "revolution" remained a powerful presence in the collective French consciousness and what I was witnessing was an outpouring of that. If you didn't like what the government was doing, you hit the streets and you made a stink and you brought about change. In fact, many of the demonstrators chanted "revolution." Watching the recent news from France has given me flashbacks of this surreal experience.

As this grimly amusing "weather report" (courtesy of friend/artist/former neighbor Seth Koen) shows, the current riots are of a much larger scale and, in my opinion, over a much more serious social issue that those I witnessed. It strikes me that France is very much in need of a true revolution. The country has tried very hard to have it both ways. They rely upon poor mainly African immigrants to do their dirty work and at the same time squash these people's own cultural heritage in the name of preserving all that is French about France. But what could be more French than la revolution? As this excellent Financial Times article points out, it's "Liberte, egalite, fraternite--but only for some." Although I hate to see the destruction that's taking place in France, I do hope this will serve as a much-needed wake-up call to a country that has not followed it's own credo for far too long.