Flaming bins and beheaded effigies: the semiology of recent protests in Paris

French history is punctuated by revolutions and uprisings, protests and demonstrations, furore and outcries. Their spirit seems to be one of revolution and political dissent, famously embodied by the French Revolution of 1789, and continuing through the twentieth century to May 1968.

Today, it seems that little has changed. Protests and strikes continually appear in the news. Recent social turmoil culminated in huge mobilisations across France to counter the pension reform, particularly in Paris. Starting in January 2023, over 10,000 tonnes of rubbish were left on the streets in the country’s capital. Bins were lit on fire, tourist locations were filled with black piles of extinguished waste, and rental bikes melted on street curbs like Dali’s watches.

President Emmanuel Macron’s changes to the retirement age were not welcome, to say the least. Prime Minister’s Élisabeth Borne’s use of Article 49.3 to push through the bill to bypass a vote was seen as an assault on democracy, and Macron’s pension reform itself was seen as yet another strike to social equality by a leader who is often accused of being the ‘president of the rich,’ and thus worryingly out of touch with the lower social classes of France.

Media coverage was often at the forefront of drawing links between the present-day protests and France’s revolutionary past. For example, in an article that focuses on the protests at Place de la Bastille, a symbolic site where the Bastille prison was destroyed during the Revolution, it was reported that “many [protestors] held posters with a montage of Macron dressed in full regalia in the manner of ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, accompanied by the slogan ‘Méprisant de la République’ (contemptuous of the Republic)” (Dodman 2023).

Furthermore, during the pension reform protests, protestors often made links between current events and those of the past – some posters referenced beheadings, especially that of Louis XVI, the last king of France, and effigies of Macron were filmed being thrown into the fires or beheaded.

Protestors also gathered in historically significant places in Paris, such as Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed by guillotine. One article drew clear links between the current protests and the revolutions of the past: “Scenes in the French capital have at times been reminiscent of ‘Les Misérables,’ with almost nightly protests, barricades of rotting bin bags and a spirit bordering on revolutionary” (Calcutt & Webber 2023). Social media gained its own momentum with platforms like Twitter (now “X”) circulating countless photos of battle-like scenes, capturing violent clashes between protestors and police riot squads, complete with fires and faceless figures amidst the smoke bombs and unsettling red lights.

The references to the 1789 French Revolution, threats of recreating the May 1968 protests, media language of battle, war, and revolution, the focus on police violence, protest banners with recycled messages, and signs inspired by Internet memes, are all part of a well-established lexicon of protest and social dissent. Although the recent protests and strikes have distinguished themselves by their cause and sheer force, they nonetheless function in a historical context and rely on a shared language, both written and visual. Political discontent lines the streets in the form of ten-thousand tonnes of uncollected rubbish; the crowd’s anger manifests as fires in the streets. Yet this is not so abnormal once we understand that it is rooted in the history and culture, even normalised. Roland Barthes (1972) might have called it naturalisation or the creation of a myth, calling for a semiological analysis of these images ripe with meaning. Or we might think of them instead as signs, each with their own significations.

O’Shaugnessy, Stadler and Casey explain that a ‘sign’ is a “stand-in for or representation of something else – the meaning, concept, or idea to which it refers” (2016: 123). Each sign consists of the signifier (the form used to convey the meaning) and the signified (the concept that is communicated). These messages use codes and conventions to communicate meaning, which ultimately depend on cultural knowledge. But it isn’t enough to recognise the sign and be able to read the ‘code’ – it is necessary to know what a sign signifies.

An understanding of what codes and signs truly communicate is what Roland Barthes sought to explore in his book Mythologies (1972), originally published in 1957. Barthes aimed to deconstruct the myth of France, looking at a range of subjects like wine and milk, soap-powders and detergents, and striptease, and investigating how these ‘myths’ were constructed by social values. He expanded upon Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) system of sign analysis, limited to linguistics, by interpreting cultural phenomena as ‘codes.’ In his semiological approach, Barthes added another level to the Saussurian model by exploring how cultural codes and phenomena are then elevated to the level of myth. Barthes argues that the connection between the signifier and the signified is collectively formed and over time becomes naturalised. The myth itself becomes a mode of signification, one that takes over normal language and rather speaks through intention than by literal senses.

Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash. What is the meaning of “France”? Where does that meaning come from?

If we return to the protests, we might begin to see deeper into their significations. The repeated images and phrases of ‘fire,’ for example, suggest destruction. The sight of a building on fire, as we saw in the media during the Paris protests, indicates the collapse of a structure, especially one that was made to last for a long time. Using fire as a weapon signifies a force that spreads and cannot be easily controlled. But fire might also be understood as a hopeful image – of new life rising from the ashes, for instance.

Barthes (1972: 113) argues that a sign elevates to a myth when it becomes accepted as universal – “the associative total of a concept and an image”. The myth ‘naturalises’ the sign and its meanings (Barthes 1972:113). This process of transformation and naturalisation for Barthes means that “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it things lose the memory that they once were made” (Barthes 1972: 143). Particularities are then appropriated in a sense and adopted into a general view. A pattern begins to take place, one abundant with repetitions and stereotypes, turns of phrases and predictable cadences. If we apply this to the media reporting on the recent protests in Paris, and the recurring images of those protests, we see that fundamental messages are repeated and even expected. What was perhaps at one point idiosyncratic has now been ‘normalised’ to the state of mythology.

In Wilson’s article on political demonstrations in France, he emphasises the connection between historical revolts and protests in modern times. For him, the slogans, the songs, and the tactics have been used for decades, perhaps centuries, and are thus deeply rooted in the past. As he says, “there is room for innovation but always within the traditions of the past that confer legitimacy upon political action and evoke deep emotions among the participants” (Wilson 1994: 35). In other words, the protestors’ idiosyncratic communication is rooted in a shared cultural history. This is not a mistake – “conformity to tradition is deliberate and self-conscious … such protest features enable participants to share vicariously in the glorious events of the past” (Wilson 1994: 35). There is undoubtedly a sense of satisfaction and shared participation in expressing insolence and anger towards the government. Beheading effigies of the president reinforces the feeling of power amongst the participants and reminds an onlooking society of their democratic ideals, as well as their determination to fight any threats against them. Ultimately, the messages embodied in the signs and symbols of the recent Paris protests communicate just as much, if not more, than the protests themselves.