Piano tunes to the sound of the accordion. It’s time for a party in the center of Paris on Saturday April 16. With one detail: the wooden instrument is installed in the middle of a road freed from cars and activists are attached to its handles using locks attached to their necks.
Between the two presidential rounds, more than a thousand demonstrators from the Extinction Rebellion movement, from all over France, took over the area around Porte Saint-Denis to denounce the“dangerous climate inaction” leaders and to propose a future “livable and fair for all”.
During this civil disobedience operation called “the inevitable rebellion”, they launched a “great agora” to put the climate back at the center of the debate. They hope to hold their blockade for three days, camping on site. This is the biggest mobilization of the movement, accustomed to punching actions, since the occupation of the Place du Châtelet in Paris in 2019.
Saturday, under a bright sun, float in the air a myriad of yellow, green, red or pink flags, bearing the recognizable logo of “XR”: the hourglass inside the circle of the Earth, painted in black. At the ends of the streets, some of the “rebels”, as they call themselves, are perched on bales of hay, others are tied together by “arm-locks” which hold their arms, or even seated, meditating, facing to the forces of order massed around the action. Two activists evolve in height in a structure of “tensegrity”, made of bamboo and cables, which seems to defy gravity but also the police. The blockage arouses the curiosity of onlookers but also the annoyance or even the anger of certain traders, who fear disorder.
“Governments under the weight of lobbies”
Activists, mostly young, denounce a “sick democracy” and leaders guilty of‘carelessness’ in the face of climate change. “It has been thirty-four years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [GIEC] exists and alerts us, but governments, which are under the weight of lobbies, do not act”, accuses Sébastien, a 46-year-old Parisian director, who prefers not to give his last name, like many “rebels”. In the sights of activists: the capitalist system “destroyer by essence”the richest 10% who hold 75% of the wealth and emit 52% of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, or even the giant Eacop oil pipeline project, of TotalEnergies, between Uganda and Tanzania.
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