“Loi sécurité globale, le grand FLOUTAGE de gueule”
For context, and since the pun is difficult to translate:
The French government is currently trying to pass a very controversial law (Loi Sécurité Globale - Global Security Law) that would forbid to film police officer and make the blurring of their faces mandatory, just as cases of Police brutality are multiplying.
The graffiti is a pun between “Floutage de gueule” (”Mug blurring”) and “Foutage de gueule” (something like “total bullshit”).
For context: on your left, our brand new Prime Minister, and on her left, our equally jovial Prefect of Paris, meaning he sort of leads police there (meaning he has been in charge of repressing various demonstrations with brutality never before seen).
Élisabeth Borne, 61, was previously Secretary of State then Ministress of Ecology (a record number of her decisions led to encouraging mass pollution), Ministress of Transports (privatising public infrastructures on an exponential rate), as well as Ministress of Labour (which was her entry ticket to her current higher post since she helped pass widely-loathed reforms jeopardising employment, lowered unemployment benefits and paved the way for extremely unpopular reforms of our retirement system). Universally characterised as ‘uncompromising’, 'rigid’ and 'intractable’, her officious nickname amongst her underlings was the unflattering 'Madame Bornée’, 'Missus Mulish’.
listening to this podcast about how the french are culturally mandated to take a 1 to 2 hour lunch break away from the workplace during which its looked down upon to talk about work. which is unfortunately the sexiest thing ive ever heard
In France, our president was qualified for the second turn of the elections, along with a far right candidate
Emmanuel Macron has implemented during his 5 years as a president terrible policies that only impoverished the working class and ruined our school system
His policies are definitely right-wing despite him claiming he’s on the “center”
If he’s reelected, his policies will be even worse, such as enabling people to work since the age of 12, making people forced to work if they want to get RSA (which is the money that the state gives to someone who doesn’t work, and therefore the RSA would be their salary while it’s below the minimum wage and a lot of disabled people who can’t work live off of this) or making university more expensive.
The problem is that the other candidate who’s in the second turn is Marine LePen, the daughter of a fucking fascist who took over his party and now has the same far right politics. Economically speaking, she’s just like Macron but with discriminatory policies towards immigrants.
So what I’m trying to say is: we’re fucked. The candidate in the third place, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is a leftist candidate with a very detailed program and who was our best hope on the left. He was only a few points away from the second turn, because some leftists decided to vote for smaller candidates instead.
Now, I’m a revolutionary, so I don’t think voting is what will really save us anyway. But what I know for sure is that the next 5 years in France will be terrible and that we’ll need to protest a lot. And since Macron (who’ll most likely be reelected) uses the police to repress protesters, police brutality will only rise. I’m really scared.
Tonight, at approximately 11 PM, the gap between Marine Lepen (far right candidate, who is qualified for the second round) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (far left candidate, who ended up in third position) is ONLY up to 0.8%.
Less than 1%.
It was so close.
Knowing that we could have won this battle is making it so much worst. I’m bitter. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m devastated. I’m disgusted.
But most of all, I’m terribly worried about the future in my country.
Without getting into too much detail (because this is another post with babble potential), I’d like to touch upon the imagery of Charlotte Corday, who definitely wins the prize for “Most Spartan” Frenchwoman, but I’d like to look at it from the English perspective. To review, Charlotte was the broad who took matters into her own hand when the executions in the French Revolution became too numerous. Placing blame on Jean-Paul Marat for the out of control killing sprees, Charlotte assassinated Marat with a butter knife in his bathtub. Well, maybe not a butter knife, but she she did buy a kitchen knife right beforehand to do the job. She was, of course, punished with the original execution of death by guillotine.
This, of course, made her a martyr. The French despised her for her actions. A man even lifted her freshly severed head from the guillotine basket to slap her cheek. The English, on the other hand, idolized the murderess. As can be seen in this Gillray print, Corday is one of the few women to be portrayed in a positive light by the satirical artist. Her depiction is very similar to those of Britannia, a rare compliment for those not of English origin. Don’t you just love how in this depiction, Charlotte address the assembly as “wretches”? Plus, I doubt Gillray ever put so much time into making a hairdo look nice as he did with this print. It should also be noted how incredibly un-French Charlotte looks. She looks more… hmm… British? Her depiction is notably in the British vogue.
The British, who have a tradition of enjoying a good rebellion (unless it is against them), felt France crossed the line with the execution of Louis XVI. Charlotte became, for them, a symbol of liberty, the exact thing France was fighting for. The French disagreed with this viewpoint and felt it was Marat, the guy who died taking a bubble bath, who was the true martyr.
Duff Cooper, Talleyrand’s biographer, on the difference between Talleyrand and Fouché was that for the former “politics meant the settlement of dynastic or international problems discussed in a ball-room or across the dinner-table; for Fouché the same word meant street-corner assassination, planned by masked conspirators in dark cellars”.
