Today Rémy sets out to start a revolution.
The moment is ripe. Macron is reforming the retirement system, and unions throughout the country are “mobilizing” as they say in France, which is another way of saying that they will, in fact, immobilize the country.
Rémy is angry. He’s angry for all the reasons a white 18-year-old Parisian from the right bank is angry. So today, he’s about to go demonstrate. At least that’s what he says. What he wants is not a demonstration. The demonstration is a means to an end. And the end is a revolution.
His parents frown upon it, and his granddad outright protests it, but they have no clout in this debate.
Rémy made sure to remind his parents that they met during the strikes of 95. His mother was even on TV telling a journalist for France 2, “We did it in 1789, we’re going to do it again!!” Short of bearing her breasts to the camera, she was the epitome of the liberated republican woman, the 90s’ version of Marianne, France’s symbol of the revolutionary female.
Rémy made sure to point out what a hypocrite his grandfather is too, showing him the little red book he used to brandish at De Gaulle in May 1968. He showed the old man pictures of the streets where he and his comrades used to placate images of chairman Mao. Now he laments about China mistreating Muslims and stealing his manufacturing business, and looks back at De Gaulle as the greatest president France has ever known. What a joke. What a hypocrite.
But Rémy is different. Rémy won’t surrender to capitalism. He won’t turn his back on the struggle of the classes, and the cause of the oppressed.
Rémy packs up his bag with a gas mask and some pepper spray, and a crowbar too, just to pop that cobblestone off the street if necessary. He crosses out every item from his checklist. The items, he got on Amazon. The checklist, he got from Gonzague’s page on Facebook.
Rémy is set. He won’t give up until Macron is out of office. And if that means that goodie two shoes teacher’s pet of a president must be taken down, if his head must end up on a pike, if that means they have to burn the Élysée palace down to the ground, if that means hanging, decapitating the elite… So be it. After all, the world was shocked by the Islamic state’s actions, but how short collective memory is.
The French Revolution counts for over 40,000 dead, not to mention the tortured, the maimed, and everything in between. The reign of terror alone ended up in over 16,000 heads chopped off, by order of execution.
Rémy is ready to fight. He doesn’t believe in the police or the military. But he believes in political ideals. He won’t give his life for his country, but he will take lives for it, if that means the end of capitalism as we know it.
Rémy heard his father yell something at him, but he’s already outside. He just slams the door.
Looking outside his parents’ apartment building, he contemplates the city streets spreading underneath him from atop the hill of the Passy district. He tells himself one thing, trying hard to believe in it: “this city is mine.”
He smiles as he passes by the Zara and the H&M. He used to shop there until recently. Hell, he’s even wearing Zara jeans right now. But by the time he’s done with the revolution, he’ll be getting his jeans from a local production unit, similar to what Mao had set up to meet England’s steel production output in the early years. Of course, Mao’s plans were flawed. But it’s because it wasn’t practical. Today, with the internet, with 3D printers, anything is possible.
And that is why, for the first time in history, the technological and societal conditions have converged to bring about the end of capitalism. That is what Gonzague said. His plan is brilliant. And this new societal model will be based on local production units.
The kommune, as Rémy is already thinking of calling it, with a k because it looks cooler, will grow their own cotton on Paris’s rooftops, on the very buildings the bourgeois elite used to live in. Maybe it will even come from his own building’s rooftop, why not? They’ll have looms set up in the basement, and they’ll even use a pulley system in order to carry the freshly harvested cotton from the rooftop to the basement. Looking around, he can already picture it. No more Zara. No more H&M. just pulley systems everywhere and people working together out of solidarity, not greed.
Rémy takes a deep breath and starts walking east toward place de la Concorde, where Gonzague has called a rally at 2pm.
Gonzague de Savigny’s meteoric rise on Facebook was a thing to behold. He opened his account just a month ago, mid November 2019. He’s now competing with Jerome Rodrigues, one of the forefathers of the gilet jaune movement, as one of the most followed online revolutionaries.
He’s the catalyst for Rémy joining the revolution. Well, him and Apolline. Apolline is the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. He first saw her at the cafe he goes to with his classmates after school. Apolline works there as a waitress, and she quickly became the real reason why Rémy became a regular customer at the place. Of course, he still enjoys talking about films and games and politics with his friends, but he also started making sure to exchange a few words and glances with Apolline, and to always leave her a tip. He never gathered the courage to talk to her though, especially not in front of his friends. Rejection would be far too embarrassing.
So he kept his distance, at least physically. He did find her on Facebook. He wasn’t proud of having looked her up. He felt like some kind of e-stalker. But once she appeared in his search result, he couldn’t help but go through her account. She hadn’t blocked it from being seen by strangers, and soon Rémy couldn’t help but learn everything there was to know about her. Her favorite films were Amelie Poulain and Pulp Fiction, her favorite singer was Bob Marley and her favorite band was daft punk... But what he saw also were lots of idealistic slogans, lots of posts for refugees and Greta Thunberg, and just as many against global warming and Trump. That is where he noticed that she reposted a lot of messages from a group called JPE, which he soon found out was an acronym for “jeunes parisiens engagés”. He noticed she was a very active member of the group, and he soon decided this was most likely the best way of getting to know her.
He joined the Facebook group and started participating in its forum discussions. Soon however, his infatuation with Apolline blossomed into an infatuation for JPE’s ideology as a whole. The whole project is so galvanising, it’s difficult to believe Gonzague is real. He doesn’t appear on video, maybe to maintain an aura of mystery, but the prose of his rants and the composition of his pictures ooze a sort of political charisma that Macron would kill for right about now.
Leaving the Passy area and heading toward the Trocadero, Remy’s heart is thumping at the prospect of finally meeting his charismatic leader. He can’t wait to get to Place de la Concorde, where the rally has been scheduled to start. The JPE protesters, Remy included, will then go up the Champs Elysées and walk all the way up to the Arc de Triomphe. A monument to Napoleon’s victories, they would have to take it down for its imperialistic connotations one day, probably replacing it with a giant tree, or maybe a statue of Gonzague.
Concorde is such an appropriate place to start the revolution. That’s where Marie Antoinette has been decapitated, he reminds himself, not without a certain amount of fascination.
Rémy notes the metros are still down. A small price to pay for a revolution, he thinks. After all, the chaos that laid the ground work to making the country ripe for the taking is none other than the series of strikes that started in early December. Gonzague can already imagine how history teachers will talk about what triggered the 2019 revolution. It all started with the government wanting to change the retirement schemes. The people, just like in 1789, tired of a system that was inherently class-based an unfair, rebelled.
The whole country’s unions opposing the government’s attempt to overhaul France’s pension scheme is what Gonzague calls the great distraction. Maybe that phrase will even stick and be taught in history classes some day. In any case, according to Gonzague, the chaos will be our generation’s single greatest opportunity to bring about the end of the fifth republic.
Remy hurries down along the Seine. He’s going to be late for Gonzague’s speech if he doesn’t hurry. He barely has thirty minutes to get to the Concorde.
He rushes past the clueless tourists and the old people. He can’t help but smile, because soon the country will be very different, and only he and a handful know about it.
He trots along the Seine, past the Eiffel Tower standing tall across it. The Eiffel Tower can stay, he thinks. The bourgeois hated it when it was built, that’s a good enough reason.
He feels his heart thumping, not out of excitement anymore though: he realises he should have exercised more. He’s never lifted a weight in his life, and he’s never done cardio, at least not on a regular basis. Some tennis once in a while, some ski in the winter, but that’s about the extent of his athletic record. He shouldn’t drink so much coke anymore either. And he should quit the marlboros too. Both will be banned soon enough anyway. Gonzague doesn’t care much for cigarettes.
He keeps rushing down along the Seine, until he passes place de l’Alma, where another member of royalty met her untimely death, this time Diana, who ran into a pillar while her chauffeur was trying to escape the paparazzi.
He gives little thought to her and keeps walking briskly. At this stage, a run is out of the question. He feels dizzy from so much running, and is starting to sweat. He can’t show up to Gonzague, let alone Apolline, all sweaty.
He’s getting closer. He can start feeling the adrenaline rush through him. He can feel the tension rising throughout the city. But what scares him the most has nothing to do with the demonstration. He is nervous about meeting Apolline. He has to look cool and composed. He has to look like he’s in control. He has to look like a veteran.
In a way, he does have some sort of training. He took part in Paris’ Counter Strike championship three years in a row now. His team even almost beat the X-team, the all star student team from polytechnique two years in ago. If it hadn’t been for Stanislas and his trigger happy reflexes, they would have won. Stan shot at Francois Xavier as he came around a corner. Thankfully, the friendly fire feature was off and Francois Xavier didn’t lose any health, but it was enough for the X-team to localize the gunshot sound through their surround sound headphones and corner Rémy’s team from behind.
But all this experience at video games can’t be for nothing. Reflexes, situational awareness, teamwork. They’ll surely prove invaluable in a combat situation. Because Remy knows, there will be combat.
Rémy finally arrives at place de la Concorde.
There he is. Only twenty years old, but already more inspiring than those decrepit politicians that plague France.
Standing on a podium in front of the Obelisk (another sign of imperialism that needs to be destroyed, or rather, returned to Egypt to its rightful owners), Gonzague speaks. He speaks vivaciously. No, he speaks, voraciously, Rémy decides. He speaks like an angel and an ogre at the same time. His silky hair and lanky figure would have perfectly fit in a painting by Delacroix. The scene convinces Rémy he is part of history. He can’t focus on what Gonzague is saying. Instead, all he can see is the man’s hands moving, his fists closing. What a man. What an orator. He can’t help but take a picture of the scene. His isn’t the only smartphone up. He noticed the kid standing next to him is broadcasting the speech live on Facebook.
Rémy just takes a picture. He goes onto Instagram and applies a filter to it, and soon Gonzague looks like Robespierre. The picture looks so historical, the pose so inspiring that Rémy can already imagine it be in his children’s history books some day. The only eye sore are the giant Samsung billboards at the left of the frame, but they can easily be photoshopped out. Until they are properly torn down and burned of course.
Gonzague talks, and Rémy listens. His emotions now under control, he can focus on what Gonzague has to say. Only then does he notice he can’t really hear him. Gonzague’s megaphone is actually quite rudimentary. Rémy opens up his Evernote app and enters “get better megaphone” in his to-do list.
He then walks up closer to listen to the speech.
Gonzague hits every note. He denounces capitalism as the root of all evil, the greed that drives our elites, the utter disregard for human dignity, the government’s inaction toward global warming, the carbon tax, which is too high, and of course, the order of the day, the age of retirement that keeps moving away into the distance like a renaissance picture’s vanishing point.
Rémy is enthralled. His heart is pumping. He keeps moving forward into the crowd. Before he notices it, he’s right at Gonzague’s feet.
Gonzague finishes his speech by pointing at the Arc de Triomphe and screaming, “let’s take back what’s ours!”
Rémy’s hands are shaking. He feels his knees are about to buckle. The sheer energy that emanates from the man, and radiates through the magnetic crowd, is almost too much for him to handle. If it weren’t enough emotions, Gonzague hands him the megaphone as he steps down from the makeshift podium, built from repurposed construction scaffolding.
“Gonzague, he stutters, it’s an honour. I think you need a better megaphone. I started making a to-do list on how to improve the rallies. People have to hear what you have to say.”
“OK, we’ll start a crowdfunding page to get a new megaphone. What’s your name?”
“Remy.”
“It’s an honour to have you among us Remy.”
“Is there anything I can do to work for you?” Remy asks.
“No,” Gonzague replies. “You can’t work for me, he says. You can work with me, comrade.”
Rémy’s heart skips a beat.
“We’re going to have to fight. They’re not going to let us through the Champs Elysees that easily.
Now let’s go and take back the power.”
He turns back to several people standing behind him.
“This is Jean-Charles, this is Baudouin, and this is Apolline.”
Rémy stops for a second. Apolline beams at him with a radiant smile.
“Oh, it’s you!” She says. “I didn’t know you were part of the movement. My name is Apolline.”
“I know”, he wants to say, but instead he says “Rémy”, which is markedly better.
The cortege starts along the Champs Elysees. The crowd is ecstatic. Among Gonzague’s minions starts a giant woof of chants against Macron, against the republic, for a new revolution. Remy notices other groups start merging with his. Some sport yellow vests, the infamous gilets jaunes, who one year ago almost to the day almost were hellbent on bringing the republic to its knees.
At the time, Remy didn’t catch the yellow vest bug. He never felt compelled by the movement. Mostly because he didn’t recognise himself in that proletariat rural crowd. Gonzague changed all that. He democratised the revolution, and now everyone is facing the same direction. He gave the movement an ideology, like a Lenin or a Trotsky. He gave it a bourgeois voice, an intellectual voice that spoked beyond the ruthlessness of the proletarian crowds blocking roundabouts in the countryside.
The group of people is not even two hundred meters onto the Champs Elysees that already the police start showing up. Not being on the frontline, Remy has a hard time understanding what is going on at first. He turns to Apolline and asks her if it’s her first demonstration. “What?” Is all she says, trying to listen over all the chants and sirens starting to be heard. Remy tries to repeat, but then suddenly starts seeing canisters of tear gas flying overhead.
He tries to keep his composure in front of Apolline, smiling at her, and trying to look reassuring, but her heart beats hard. He recognises these images, as if he was experiencing deja vu, from the TV and from YouTube. He saw all those videos, where tear gas flies, where people riposte by throwing cobblestone. But this time it’s real. There’s no filter. No screen separating his reality from the action.
For the first time in his life, he feels alive. He turns to Apolline. For a second, everything seems to slow down. For just a second, an angel passes, and silence fills the crowd. Apolline smiles at him, and says “It has begun.”
Then, the commotion and chaos kick in full gear. She grabs him by the hand. Is this really real? He thinks, as he makes his way up to the front line.
Pushing his way forward, he now can see the cops about 50 meters away from where he is standing, elbow to elbow with his brothers in arms. Gonzague and Apolline, now freedom fighters, among many others, are all lined up facing the cops, chanting communist slogans and calling the police fascists.
The police, slow and heavy posing in their pathetic urban armors, stare blankly at the crowd. They try to look tough, but Remy knows it’s all a show. Behind their little toys, there are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, who just want to go home in one piece.
The cops start out by shooting water canons under the bovine eye of their infantry troops trenched behind barricades. Gonzague’s frontline disperses in just a few seconds. But Remy stands his ground. He knows the revolution can’t stop so fast. He picks up wooden planks and other fences the police had originally placed along the avenue to keep the crowd from overflowing onto the sides. He piles them up into a makeshift barricade and stands his ground.
By the time the cops notice him, his barricade is done, and the water cannon is too far to wash it away. Remy yells “Come on! We can’t turn back now! Let’s go!”
People pay heed and start consolidating and expanding the barricade, which soon spans the whole width of the avenue.
With that, Remy picks up his crowbar and pops up the cobblestones. He distributes them to the men around him, and starts throwing some himself at the police. Overhead, he sees men covered in black masks also starting to throw stones and even pétanque balls onto the pigs.
One of them hits a cop right in the face, shattering the face protection on his helmet. The projectile that hit wasn’t Remy’s, but a feeling of euphoria still washes over him. Blood spurts from the man’s face, if you still could call that a face even. More stones and pétanque balls land with satisfactory cracks.
Remy is a bit grossed out with all the gore, but he tries to remind himself that it’s just like in the video games, and that it was much worse during the revolution in 1789. Those cops are just collateral damage. They signed up for this, now it’s time to give it to them. If they only understand violence, hell, he’ll give them violence.
Taking advantage of the confusion in the police ranks, Remy’s front starts to move forward again, further up the Champs-Elysees.
However, the progression turns out to be short lived. This time, riot-control armoured vehicles arrive and start pushing Remy’s frontline into the crowd. For a second, he panics at the thought of getting run over completely by one of the vehicles.
The group retreats, and Remy runs along with them. For the first time, he starts fearing for his life. The energy is electric, and no one knows what’s going on anymore. Just as they are about to arrive back at Concorde to disperse, another group of policemen sandwich them from both up and down the avenue.
Clearly, they’re about to get arrested. And that’s the best case scenario. Gonzague starts panicking. For the first time, he looks like a kid, not a revolutionary leader. “Do something!” He yells, at no one in particular.
Apolline is confused.
Rémy hops onto a pile of trash that lies there. He yells louder than he ever has in his life. As he sees the crowd around him, and the cops circling in on it, he feels his whole life has been leading up to this moment. But he doesn’t have time to let the ego take over. He speaks from his heart.
“People! Comrades! They leave us no choice! We can’t go forward, we can’t go back, so let’s go to the side! To the Élysée palace!”
The crowd repeats Remy’s words.
“They leave us no choice!”
And with that, the entire crowd is set ablaze with the passion of the revolution. Remy knows that it’s the same passion that flares up in every Frenchman and woman when they witness injustice in this world, the same passion that animated the brave men and women to resist the invading Germans during World War 2.
It’s all been leading up to this, Rémy thinks. This is his defining moment.
They rush towards the gates, Rémy leading the charge.
Soon enough, he sees cops getting hit on each side. For a second, it really feels like he can pull this off. He and others count to three and throw themselves onto the fence protecting the Élysée. It is the last line of defence. Finally, after the tenth push or so, the fence lets go in an orgasmic crack.
For a second, Rémy looks around him. Men and women are rushing through the gardens, towards the palace. The cops and the military, for all their badass gear and their tough attitude, seem hypnotised before the crowd rushing them. He wonders how it has come to this. It’s really happening. It’s as if God had pointed down at him from heaven and chose him to lead the French people. This is how a revolution happens, he thinks, as he looks around him. He sees Apolline smile at him, then suddenly she jumps into his arms and kisses him passionately. She then jumps off and starts running into the rushing crowd that’s washing over the Élysée garden.
Gonzague high-fives him as he too runs ahead to the palace. He climbs up onto what is left of the grid and the barricades and calls for all his followers to storm the building.
The “Macron, démission!” slogan soon morphs into “Macron, pendaison!” as the crowd gains grown. Bullets can be heard whizzing by, but they are unreal, just virtual, less real than in the video games. It’s already game over.
A helicopter takes off from the courtyard at the opposite side of where Rémy’s mob is. Rumors that Macron is onboard spread like wildfire. Rocks are thrown almost vertically to try to hit the aircraft. Some of them fall back straight onto the crowd. At the same time, the police seems to unleash everything they have onto the crowd. Bullets whizz by, canisters of tear gas rain onto the crowd. Usually thrown in an arc, the police now aims their cougar tear gaz launchers horizontally at the crowd. In retrospect, the media will argue whether it was to avoid hitting the helicopter, or to use the canisters as impact weapons. It makes little difference.
As everything seems to move in slow motion around Rémy, as he sees the crowd go berserk and start pummelling the police and the army’s last line of defence, he sees every drop of blood, every piece of shrapnel, every shockwave spreading through soft tissues into bones and cartilage. The only thing he doesn’t see coming, the only thing he doesn’t even feel at first, is the object that flies into his right eye.
Without even a second to blink, Rémy ducks as he instinctively realises he’s been hit. He loses his balance and ends up on his belly. He looks down at the pavement and sees blood dripping from the right side of his face. The thought already hits him. Has he lost an eye? No, the blood is just covering his right socket, he will just have to wipe it off and he will see again. But as he does so, all he feels is a mess of flesh where his eye used to be.
Through his one good eye, it hits him. The utopia, the Delacroix paintings, the Marianne bust he saw as a kid, Gonzague waving the flag atop the place de la Concorde. This was all built on blood. The decorations on the Elysées walls, the cobblestone on the Paris streets. The bridges and the statues. It was all built on blood. Too much blood. He doesn’t want to see it anymore. He doesn’t want to taste it anymore. He doesn’t want to shed it anymore. In one second, his thirst for violence has been quenched forever. In one second, he overdosed on the bloodshed.
But this is where god, just as fast as he picked him, lets him down. Remy lost control. Pushed back to the sidelines of history, he cannot stop the violence anymore.
The revolution has begun.