“Ask Fakir! Ask Fakir!” The few peddlers of the newspaper founded by François Ruffin zigzag between the rows of chairs, on the stairs where people still sit, for lack of seats. It is not 7:30 p.m., this Tuesday, January 10, that we are already jostling in the Olympe de Gouge room, not far from Place Léon Blum in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. A marching band blew its trumpets to welcome political activists and leftist supporters. We sing the Italian revolutionary song “Bella Ciao”, we raise our fists to the sky and we distribute “anti-capitalist” leaflets or the ecological collective Last Renovation. Those who still doubted it cannot be mistaken: the left is in a meeting. She made an appointment there, in Paris on the right bank, a few hours after the Prime Minister announced the main lines of the pension reform, the one which pushes back the retirement age to 64 and makes of anger the thousand people who responded to François Ruffin’s call.
It was he, the rebellious deputy from the Somme, who had the idea for this gathering. He organized it in a hurry, a week earlier. He had the idea in mind for some time, with his lieutenants, and a room became free that day. Lucky coincidence, he said. He played tout, heating up his phone. His friends from Fakir, of course, and Hervé Kempf, the boss of the environmental activist news site Reporterre, are handling everything. The First Secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, apologizes and sends Boris Vallaud. The deputy for Landes, leader of the socialist group in the National Assembly, comes from a constituency which is very similar to that of his friend Ruffin, with its craftsmen in crisis, its small people at the end of difficult months, its unemployment in rise, his RN vote which continues to increase from election to election. Mathilde Panot, leader of the rebellious deputies, Marine Tondelier, new national secretary of the ecologists, and the communist Fabien Roussel have come a long way.
“You have to touch hearts and guts”
We also meet the rebellious Clémentine Autain, Alexis Corbière and Raquel Garrido, the “coco” of Paris Ian Brossat, the socialist Arthur Delaporte, trade unionists, environmental activists. All the left is there, or almost. This same left which was insulted yesterday sings together. Mouloud Sahraoui, Geodis handler, Julien Gourguechon, sales consultant at Leroy Merlin, Séverine Marotel, home help from Domidom, and Frédéric Bedel, forester from the ONF, are brought up to the podium. There are also economists, all committed to the cause against pension reform. It is 8:40 p.m. when François Ruffin goes on stage. We give him a standing ovation. The herald of the evening.
“The unions are united, the left is united”, boasts the deputy-reporter. Another ovation. He torpedoes Elisabeth Borne, “a judge who comes to deliver her sentence: two more years!”. And don’t forget Emmanuel Macron, “Ronald Reagan’s grandson”. “He has given up trying to convince the French. He is counting on resignation, on the what’s the point, that’s how it is. Our worst opponent is neither him nor Borne. It’s people’s indifference! ” He did not come there to distill the arguments to oppose on the merits, to say why and how much the reform is unfair in his eyes. “The subject is no longer of the order of reason, he shouts at the microphone. You have to touch hearts. And hearts are joy. It must be said that retirement, this n It’s not hardship but a prospect of happiness, a new age of life. You have to touch the guts of the French, touch their pride. How they allow themselves to distribute billions in dividends to their friends up there and it tells us we should be rationed.”
“This reform is retirement for the dead”
After the ecologist Marine Tondelier who promises “the ZAD to the National Assembly”, an initially shy socialist takes the podium. This is Boris Vallaud. He remembers that, a few years earlier, these same people, in these same meetings, hissed the PS, “the social traitors”, they even shouted. Water flowed under the bridges, and the Nupes passed by. A silence ensues. On the left, sympathizers and activists always make a small pout when a socialist comes before them. A pout that says mistrust, but disappears when Boris Vallaud charges Emmanuel Macron: “He’s not a reformer, he’s a liquidator.”
And if Ruffin appeals to “the heart” and “the guts”, the socialist, he draws on the imagination of the past of the left. “This reform is retirement for the dead,” he says, using the words of the CGT of 1910 which denounced the law on workers’ and peasants’ pensions. He invokes Ambroise Croizat, Communist Minister of Labor, father of Social Security, the pay-as-you-go pension system and occupational medicine. He begins to dream that the January mobilizations against Emmanuel Macron’s reform resemble the procession of thousands of people who accompanied Croizat’s coffin. To applause, he recites a report from Humanity of the time: “Thousands, over kilometers […]miners from the Nord or Ales, in blue, lamp by the side, steelworkers from Citroën or Renault, elected officials barred with scarves, the whole of France had made an appointment.
Where the hell is Mélenchon?
Mathilde Panot and Fabien Roussel follow in their footsteps on stage, in much less bombastic speeches. The communist, who calls for “blowing the gauges” of the event scheduled for January 19, swears: “Proposals, we have them!” Who cares ? Nobody came for that. It is not an air of electoral campaign, with its projects, its measures, its ideas, its promises which floats. This is another thing. “The start of the big night, of the general strike,” hops a grizzled activist who sports New Anti-Capitalist Party stickers on his brown leather jacket. What François Ruffin was looking for on Tuesday evening was to rekindle a flame on the eve of a social movement against the pension reform that he hopes will be historic; it was to ring the tocsin.
The room may be full, an absence is felt, and not the least. Where the hell is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Isn’t it him, the leader of Nupes, who should be there, haranguing the crowds? He is thousands of kilometers away, in Guyana for about ten days. Far from everything, far from the struggle, far from the day the battle started. Nobody talks about his great march of January 21 that he launched, the one that angers the unions and that the partners of the Nupes will sulk. Only January 19, the date of the unions, counts. And if millions of people are pounding the pavement, as promised by Fabien Roussel, some will say that it all started here, on January 10, Olympe de Gouge room. It was François Ruffin who was the conductor. 2027 is never far away for anyone.