Allons enfants

A few nights ago, after the election of François Hollande, the first socialist president in 17 years, his supporters took the Bastille. I had gone bowling on rue Mouffetard, as I always do on the first Sunday of the month (the Half-Assed Bowling League has garnered quite a following) but this time I abandoned my playmates to their cheersing and smack-talking to head out and see the throngs. And oh, there were throngs.

Gyrating lefties on every available surface, scaling lampposts and signposts and bus stops. Newsstands’ rooftops miraculously withstanding the weight of a dozen full-grown adults. People breaking into song- improvised tunes about getting rid of Sarkozy, and the well-practiced Socialist Party anthems I had heard for years at the concert series the newspaper l’Humanité puts on (hint: always the cheapest beer in Paris). There were children and teenagers and someone’s dog on his shoulder. People apologizing for pushing into each other and strangers striking up conversations.

Now, I’m not the wildest fan of Hollande for a few reasons, and I’m a little wary of what he will be able to do with the economy, but the waves of excitement were truly amazing. Because Paris is THE capital of the country, and because France is small enough for travel to be reasonable, it becomes an obvious rallying point and a real center for culture and movement. Toulouse, Lyon, Lille, all lovely places, but it’s tough for me to understand why people would choose to live away from this city. 

Usually the Bastille is, like most monuments in Paris, just the center for an enormous roundabout. I ride through it all the time on my bike, it’s not as bad as the Arc de Triomphe, but you do have to keep on your toes or you could get clipped by a Smarte car. On foot, when trying to decide which café has the cheapest happy hour (it’s the Indiana), you get stopped regularly by tourists holding out maps, looking for the prison. It was torn down in 1789. You know, after the revolution. I read once that they sold off pieces of it as souvenirs, like the Berlin wall. The more things change… Now the only way to see vestiges of the prison is to go down to the line 5 metro platform. The bit of the wall there used to be covered in beer cans and candy wrappers, but I think they put up some kind of glass barrier recently. Too bad, I kind of liked it as this quiet affirmation: “Yeah, we had a king once, now we have public transportation.”

I was in France when Obama was elected, and that is a scene I regret missing. I still have some telephone messages from friends saved, you can barely hear them above the cheers and music and catcalls from the streets of San Francisco, but they all say “he won! You can come home now!” Seeing the Bastille overrun with people, the column invaded by supporters with signs, with flags from all over the world, it seemed like elections should be triumphant, maddening, rallying. A hope for change, for me at the very least a vote against apathy. Party for politics.

 

And it was really not a bad party. I was on my way out when I stopped to hear a brass band play, and the little French motorcade drove Hollande by, back towards the Bastille to make his address. I followed, along with the band and its audience. I could see him on the screen from my spot between rue de la Roquette and the opera house, but heard nothing over the cries of foghorns, the whistles of fireworks and flares, and the chanting of support slogans. The tall dude to my left kindly read the speech to me from the subtitles (well, maybe it was for his nuzzling sans-culottes girlfriend). People kept excusing themselves for pushing me around in the crowd, and everyone chimed in with the new French president to sing the Marseillaise.