Tag: France

As a new exhibition opens in Paris on the enigmatic figure who discovered Seurat, championed Pissarro, and was accused of murdering the French president, Harry Pearson examines the influence of the greatest tastemaker of his generation

48 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an immense crowd. 1 This was a popular action arising from the grassroots, not a spectacle coordinated by politicians.

We published recently on our blog, as we had access to them and they reached us, some documents produced by and around the “yellow vest” movement that has been shaking France since several weeks. The following is a kind of introduction to all of them (an introduction that we usually publish before, indeed).

Alongside government repression, what poses a greater threat to the yellow vest movement—the reactionaries who are participating in order to present themselves as the alternative to Macron’s neoliberalism, or the reformists who aim to replace horizontal self-organization with new party structures and legislation? In the following analysis, we show how these two phenomena are connected.

Since November 2018, the yellow vest movement has created a political crisis in France and posed thorny questions to radicals worldwide. In the following report, we detail the yellow vest actions from December 8, 2018 to January 5, 2019, recounting how the yellow vest movement defied the calendar—that age-old device for limiting revolutionary movements.

via Libcom.org by the Shoal Collective The eyes of the world were on Paris on Saturday December 15 for Act V of the astonishing uprising of...

Since November, France has been shaken by the yellow vest movement, a grassroots reaction to President Macron’s proposal to increase fuel taxes in order to force the poor to pay for the transition to “ecological” technologies. Like the Occupy movement, the yellow vest movement cohered around shared tactics and frustration rather than common goals or values; consequently, the movement has been a battleground for many different political agendas and factions.

The yellow vest protests has been disrupting France for weeks and has turned into a broader social movement. Infoshop News brings you a round-up of the latest news, developments, media, opinion and analysis.

If one feature of any truly revolutionary moment is the complete failure of conventional categories to describe what's happening around us, then that's a pretty good sign we're living in revolutionary times.

In response to Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to increase the tax on fuel for “ecological” reasons, France has experienced several weeks of unrest associated with the yellow vest movement. This grassroots uprising illustrates how the contradictions of modern centrism—such as the false dichotomy between addressing climate change and considering the needs of the poor—can create social movements that offer fertile ground for populists and nationalists.