Boulangeries. That’s what always gets me. You’re rushing through some side street to a demonstration or a political rally, hardware store owners and jewellers are winding down their metal shutters, but the cake shops are stalwart. In this city of immense violence -- the place that invented the barricade and the struggle for the city -- coming through the side streets of the 10th arronidsement, one still passes windows full of eclairs in brown and green icings, petits fours dripping in marzipan, cream horns, the works. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the people walking beside me were carrying gas masks…

We all came into the Place de la Republique, the habitual radical gathering place in the inner north-east, midpoint between bourgeois Paris, black Paris and hipster/rave/anarchist Paris. There were a couple of thousand gathered there by late morning, but only a few hundred in the hi-viz yellow vest, the gilet jaune. There were buskers, clowns, mimes -- this was ground zero for annoying political theatre -- and quite a few black-clad, black bloc anarchists, scowling and looking like they weren’t going to put on some crappy yellow vest for no one. Plus journos, bloggers etc from across the world. Lotta gas masks. Army disposal stores have done a roaring trade. But nothing much was happening.