La France fracturee : From La marche des Beurs to Les Gilets Jaunes

O'Dowd-Smyth, Christine (2021) La France fracturee : From La marche des Beurs to Les Gilets Jaunes. In: Margins and Marginalities in France and Ireland : A Socio-Cultural Perspective. Peter Lang AG, pp. 67-83. ISBN 9781789977479

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

This chapter examines thirty-five years of politically motivated protests, demonstrations and riots in France, from the 1983 'La marche des Beurs' where hundreds of thousands of young people, born in France, of North African immigrant origin, took to the streets to demand recognition of their Frenchness; to a rich cultural productivity in auto-ethnographical literature and film emanating from what Matthew Moran has described as 'Internal Outsiders'; to Mathieu Kasovitz's 1995 film La haine, depicting life lived on the margins in the soulless sink estates or banlieues; to 2018, and the massive demonstrations organised by Les gilets jaunes, I will argue that this politics of protest, stemming from the French Revolution, is both an intrinsic part of French culture as it is a symptom of a divided and fractured society. As Olivier Besancenot said of the general strike in 2019 'La lutte continue'. This chapter will also provide, by way of comparison, the situation in Ireland, where although there is a recent & burgeoning protest movement (against water charges; homelessness and for the Repeal of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution) again politically motivated and organised by the new parties of the Left (People Before Profit; Anti Austerity Alliance), there has not been a strong social movement of people protesting and rioting, even when the country entered a period of austerity. This growing movement of harnessing public anger, in Ireland, has not yet found its literary and artistic expression. In both France and Ireland, when the margins are appearing at the centre, in the capital cities of Paris and Dublin, and these margins are joined by students, by pensioners, by workers who no longer afford a certain standard of living, it is, to quote Gilles Deleuze, when Difference must leave its cave and cease to be a monster, that difference can be 'mediated'.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Publisher Copyright: © Peter Lang Group AG 2021. All rights reserved.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300
Departments or Groups:
Depositing User:	Admin SSL
Date Deposited:	19 Oct 2022 23:16
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2023 00:03
URI:	http://repository-testing.wit.ie/id/eprint/4983

Actions (login required)

View Item