Melée on the Côte d’Azur
Notes from the Southeast
Explosions rocked the Côte d’Azur last weekend. In two days, the southeast of France suffered three attacks of sabotage to the electric grid, causing blackouts Saturday in Cannes, Antibes and Cagnes-sur-Mer, depriving 160,00 homes of power. An electric tower in Tanneron was set on fire and a pylon had its base severed in Villeneuve-Loubet. On Saturday afternoon another tower west of Nice burned, cutting power to 45,000 homes.
Local politicians, Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice and Eric Ciotti, Senate deputy for the Alpes-Maritimes, were quick to characterize it as an act of terrorism.
A manifesto said to be the work of the perpetrators quickly surfaced on an anarchist website. Those with high hopes of criticism of this year’s Cannes fest will not be disappointed. The festival "serves as a showcase for a grandiloquent French Republic, defender of the values of Progress on the international stage, but above all the second largest arms exporter in the world. French excellence in this field arms NATO and sows death, from Yemen to Gaza, from Ukraine to the Sahel,” characterizing the world of cinema as "the industrial garbage of our society," which wants to make us forget "the real planet, rotten with factories, freeways, concrete and mines." Not a cheery bunch.
All in all, a perfect theatrical – of posing, pretension and paranoia. Something for everyone. The Society of the Spectacle marches on: militant miscreants get to topple electricity poles, people go without television for a few hours during the long, late-Spring days, conservative politicians posture about terrorism, and manifesto writers throw a tantrum about anything that upsets them. They, of course, don’t make movies or anything much at all; they were educated to regard culture as a social construction, with a particular animus for the French version.
The grand finale at Cannes nevertheless took place as scheduled last Saturday. Who the real winners are is open to debate.
Whether the long manifesto excerpted above has anything to do with the attacks is still unclear, or as the papers put it, ‘its veracity is currently being evaluated by investigators.’
(What will the phantom ‘Ultra-Left’ come out against next... wheels ? Hair dryers, washing machines ? Barber shops and beauty salons? All play their part in Our Way of Life Under Capitalism. Chairman Mélenchon has yet to weigh in.)
Resistance to the Nazi regime was a regular occurrence in the country’s southeast, with industrial sabotage and train derailments, making life difficult for the Occupier. Residents of the Rhone-Alpes-Côte d’Azur have been through worse.
(Unless of course, last weekend’s actions are the work of the group called The Third Force, neither right nor left, a shadowy organization determined to fulfill Blanqui’s vision of a Parisian dictatorship, eliminating elections for the next seventy years in favor of rule by a committee of enlightened autocrats. That crowd is on the pipe, frequently employing thespians to spread their message. More about them later.)
While it is tempting to write this all down as play-acting at its finest, something I didn’t completely avoid above, it is also the image of a society slowly coming apart under the pressure of irreconciliable, centrifugal forces and beliefs. The French are still French but disagreements between factions are in plain sight: conservative politicians chant about terrorism while a separate, powerful block of actors believe in a new, progressive France that will overturn the evils of the past, even, if necessary, French identity and culture. All this is over the French paysans’ heads; they sat in darkness and endured. At least they were spared the pre-fabricated news for a few hours. 2027 awaits.
One of my favorite street signs in Paris, behind Ste.-Clothilde in the 7th. Must I stop or must I keep going? Open to interpretation. The police are waiting for you to decide.
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