Bastille Day 1997: Crowd Control Paris Style

Trying to attend festivities on Bastille Day 1997, my son and I were baffled at every turn by the crowd-control finesse of the French gendarmes.

This is a repost of a travel story in honor of Bastille Day. It’s an account about how my grown son, Liberty, and I were foiled by Parisian gendarmes at every turn when we tried to attend two celebrations of France’s Fête Nationale, during the only trip either of us took to France, in 1997.

Mid-afternoon on the 4th of July 2001, I listened to a National Public Radio interview with a security official at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The official told the reporter her staff was applying stricter measures than ever before in light of warnings about possible terrorist activity on our national holiday.

The official gave one example of how they were trying to balance enforcing more controls while trying not to make people feel too constrained. They put up snow fences instead of fixed fencing, as a gentler way to establish a perimeter without making people feel like they were caged.

This bit of considerate crowd-control psychology from our nation's capital gave me a flashback to my only visit to France in 1997. It reminded me of how my grown son and I experienced much-sterner Parisian methods of crowd control firsthand during Bastille Day, France's Fête Nationale (their national holiday of independence).

Because of the astute manipulation of the gendarmes one Bastille Day in Paris, even though we set out to attend two celebrations, one in the morning and one in the evening, we were prevented from arriving at either—without any kind of direct confrontation, almost without us realizing what was going on. Even though Americans might not accept all of the techniques we saw practiced that day, security officials in the USA might be able to learn a few things from those French gendarmes about finesse.

How We Got There

My twenty-seven-year-old son, Liberty, and I were in France for the first time. We had first flown to Paris and then took a rapid train to Montpellier, in the south of France, where we rented a car and drove north for about 25 miles to attend a yoga retreat. (I had returned to the Catholic faith of my childhood in the late 1970s, but even afterwards, I took years of yoga classes to try to stretch out my back, and sometimes I persuaded my son to take classes and go to yoga retreats with me for his own chronic back pain—before I came to believe that yoga practice was spiritually dangerous.)

During the retreat week in the south of France, in the Languedoc-Roussillon wine-growing region, we stayed in an ancient stone farmhouse-turned-guesthouse called Le Mas des Rives. While I was unpacking in my upstairs room, I heard an odd type of cawing coming through the windows from the shrubbery around the farmyard. It could be a crow, I thought, maybe, but if so, French crows must have far more angst than their American cousins.

When the group I was with was eating together later outside at a picnic table, I realized that what I had first thought was a French crow’s anguished croak was actually coming from a peacock, who was dragging his long, feathered tail behind it up the gravel driveway.

The group practiced yoga every morning in a little studio in the middle of vineyards, which the haughty Americanized Frenchman who taught the class rented from a local yoga teacher. The other attendees, who included a couple of plump 40ish female “dance therapists” who attended our teacher’s classes back in the States, were haughty too and cliquish, so Liberty and I pretty much were left to our own company.

At a bar one night, with the group but not of it, we watched a troupe of Apache (the French pronounce it Apaché dancers, who, when they weren’t throwing each other around the dance floor, were putting away large quantities of vin rouge de la maison.

For a demonstration of the Apache dance style, here is a British Pathé short from 1934 in which two dancers perform a 'Danse Apache' set in a seedy French bar while watched by some "toffs.”

A more-uplifting memory from that week was of a charming statue of a Madonna with Child titled Notre Dame des Vignerons (Our Lady of the Winegrowers), which I discovered driving past a church in the village of Vacquières. The statue is picturesquely situated outdoors against a background of vineyards and a mountain called Pic San Loup, which gives its name to the wine region called Languedoc Pic Saint-Loup. Though sources differ about the name St. Loup, the peak or “pic” above the vineyards was named for Saint Thieri Loup, one of three pious Crusaders, who were brothers, and suitors to a beautiful lady named Bertrade. All three became hermits after her untimely death.

The statue delighted me because it is evidence that devotion that persisted among the winegrowers even until 1954, the date on the statue’s plaque. I am especially charmed by the wine cask the local vineyard owners placed as a votive offering at the statue's feet.

Back at home, I did a watercolor from the photo, and then I did a drawing on canvas, in preparation for an ambitious attempt to emulate a seven-layer oil-painting technique I’d read about, which had supposedly enabled the old masters to achieve such rich depth in their paintings. I think I gave up at the third layer, at sepia. In addition to all the time you have to wait between each layer to let the oil paint dry, it's not easy to stay motivated and paint the same painting over and over again.

After the yoga retreat was over, we drove to Paris and registered in a small hotel in the Montparnasse district to tour Paris for another week before returning to the U.S.

Bastille Day

On Bastille Day morning, I persuaded my late-sleeping son to get up early (early for him means before noon) so we could view a military parade down the Champs-Élysées, from the Arc de Triomphe towards the Louvre.

As I got dressed to go to the parade, I found myself singing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. "Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé” ("Let us go, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived.") Ever since I first started taking French as a sophomore in high school, reading existential philosophers, and studying art history, I had always been what is called a Francophile. I loved France and all things French. My six years of language study 30 years earlier was finally put to use during this trip, and I greatly enjoyed talking to people and being understood, in French.

Now, at last, I was having a chance to put the Marseillaise to use. I was going to celebrate the beginning of the French Republic, here in Paris, where it all happened!

We left our hotel and walked a few blocks to the closest entrance stairs that descended into the sweltering hot and sometimes urine-reeking subway, Le Metro. During one of our dashes down a long tunnel connecting one metro line to the other, we caught two young shaven-headed guys spraying graffiti on the tunnel wall. They were startled, but when they saw we were Americans, they called "USA the best" to us as we went by. Puzzled by the encounter, not sure what to do, if anything, we just kept going. Finally, we arrived at the Metro stop for the Champs-Élysées. On the street at the top of the stairs from the station platform, we found gendarmes leaning on temporary iron fences.

The gendarmes motioned for us to proceed in a certain direction. But the direction to which they pointed seemed wrong, because it would take us away from the parade route. But Monsieur, I said in French to one of them, we want to watch the parade. The gendarme's face did not register any expression, and he would not reply, just impatiently motioned for us to keep going.

Having no choice, we proceeded in the direction indicated. All along the way, crowds were packed tight on the sidewalks behind rows of temporary fences. At one point, I tried to make my own alternate route back to the Champs-Élysées but was stopped and turned back by another gendarme.

Blocks later, many more blocks away from the Champs-Élysées, we squeezed in tight with the crowds in front of a famous building called La Madeleine (which I later learned is a church dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene). We stood there for hours. Eventually, small bands of police and firemen paraded by. While we waited for the big show that never appeared, the main parade was going on without us. Only a small portion of the parade was routed in our direction. The tanks and the big artillery were marching on the main route, hopelessly out of our reach.

We thought that we would have better luck that evening if we left early. So, about three hours before the fireworks were scheduled to start, we took the metro again, this time towards the Tour d’Eiffel. But the subway train did not stop when it got to the station nearest the Eiffel Tower. Or at the next stop after that. The first stop where we were allowed to exit turned out to be on the wrong side of the Seine, away from the tower. No problem, I figured, we will simply take one of the bridges back. But the bridges were lined with gendarmes, and we were not allowed to pass.

Baffled at being turned back again from yet another destination, we sat down at an outside table for dinner at the first restaurant we noticed. It was Chinese. We reasoned that we would be able to go later to watch the fireworks from across the river when it got dark.

On top of everything else that was not working out to my satisfaction that day, the food was very bad. It took a long time to get our meal. My egg roll's skin was made from wheat flour (instead of rice flour), fried hard and slightly blackened. The vegetables in my chow mein were stewed instead of stir-fried.

Locals liked the place, not knowing any better, I thought. A French couple with a little white dog sitting next to us told us they had been coming to that restaurant for years. It meant a lot to them that the Chinese owner/waiter (just barely) acknowledged their acquaintance.

I was glum about this setback, too. Here I was in Paris, trying to celebrate Bastille Day. Not only was I missing out on all the action, but I was also eating bad Chinese food. Merde!

And as it turned out, when the fireworks started, we weren't allowed to get any closer. Even there on the street in front of the restaurant, miles away from the action again, two young gendarmes were lounging on some more of the ever-present portable fences. Talking with them was futile.

When I tried to go past their barricade, they stopped me again. So I resignedly returned to my seat at the restaurant. The only time the gendarmes emerged from their pose of stone-faced boredom was when two young women came and asked them something. Then they were distinctly interested.

Our seat at the sidewalk table at the restaurant gave us a view of buildings across the street and down into a side street. I amused myself by sketching the street scene. The only fireworks we saw that evening were the printed ones on a street sign advertising the July sales (Soldes). Only a few sparks from the fireworks across the river floated up into the patch of sky we could see over the mansard windows and the roofs on the side street.

How do they do it? The crowd control methods, as I saw them practiced in Paris, require huge amounts of pre-planning, and large numbers of police, not to speak of miles of temporary fences. After a predetermined maximum number of people show up for an event, anyone who arrives afterward is not sent home but simply diverted to some other area. No explanations are ever given. Les capacités de contrôle des foules des Français sont redoutables!

Thinking about the bloody frenzy of the atheistic French Revolution and its aftermath later in my life, I was no longer convinced I should have bothered to go out of my way to celebrate the fall of the Bastille anyway.

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The above snippet is from a fascinating account from a British newspaper of the events of Bastille Day, the day after they occurred, which is no longer available.

It was on this day in 1789 that an angry French mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, an event that launched the French Revolution. The Bastille was a medieval fortress, built in the 14th century, with eight towers, each 80 feet tall. It was used as a prison, and it had a reputation as a place where political prisoners and enemies of the royal family would rot away in miserable dungeons without a proper trial. By 1789, under the reign of Louis XVI, the Bastille didn't have many prisoners, and the conditions were relatively comfortable — some wealthy prisoners even brought their own servants. Nonetheless, regular people considered the Bastille a symbol of royal oppression. . . .

Angry citizens took to the streets — there was widespread looting, with food and weapons stolen. They gathered thousands of guns but needed gunpowder, and the Bastille was known to contain a large store of ammunition. By mid-morning, thousands of people had gathered outside the Bastille, demanding gunpowder and the release of prisoners. They soon grew tired of negotiating and attacked. The fighting lasted several hours. Almost 100 attackers were killed and just one guard. But the mob was successful, and flooded into the prison. There turned out to be only seven prisoners to liberate: four forgers, two lunatics, and an aristocrat accused of incest. The mob killed the governor of the Bastille and paraded around the city with his head on a pike.

When King Louis XVI returned that evening from a day of hunting, one of his noblemen recounted the day's events at the Bastille. Louis is said to have asked, "So this is a revolt?" to which his duke replied: "No, Sire, this is a revolution!"—The Writer’s Almanac

Image: Siege of the Bastille (shortly after 1789). By Claude Cholat, an eyewitness. At Le Musée Histoire de Paris Carnavalet. Public domain.