Tractors!

Ah how I love good weather in Paris. For many reasons, obviously, but one of the highlights is that it's the return of strike season. Well, this is France, so it's always strike season, but there seem to be significantly more when the weather is nice. Wonder why that might be :-)

Today thus proved to be a winner on all fronts: we are having BRILLIANT weather (66 and bright sun, absolutely perfect). And...grain producers are pissed off. Which meant one thing: they were coming to Paris to protest, WITH THEIR TRACTORS! Yes.

Now, this being the country that perfected the strike, they don't mess around. 10,000 people were expected to participate, and there were about 1,300 tractors. Hahahahaha. Miles and miles of tractors, making a big loop through eastern Paris. Obviously I had to go investigate.

Before I move into the pics, I should explain what the problem is: they are protesting the restructuring of the European Common Agricultural Policy, which has HUGELY favored French farmers. French farmers made out extremely well on the Maastricht Treaty and have benefited from important subsidies. That's all being shuffled around now, so they're understandably worried. Apparently revenues went down 30% two years ago and then an additional 50% last year. So yes, clearly a bad situation.

Anyway, I decided to go check out the tractor parade over by Bastille. As I was walking over, I came upon the sign of a good "manif," as the French would call it. Because the French invented revolutions, they also invented revolution control, namely the riot police. haha. The CRS is no joke. The entire Blvd. Bourdon was lined with CRS trucks:

It didn't seem all that necessary, actually, as everyone was in an extremely good mood. The tractors were honking, bystanders were cheering. Everyone was taking pictures because, well, how often do you see a tractor tooling down the street in Paris, let alone 1300 of them? haha. Here they are in their full glory, at Bastille:

I was so taken with them that I decided to follow them on their route, so I started walking up Beaumarchais:


This is one of my favorite pictures of the day, since you can see the Bastille column all the way at the end (a memorial to, what else, the Glorious Three-Day Revolution of 1830):

As you can see, some of the tractors were all done up:

That one is sort of a play on words, hard to explain. Literally it says "no country without the countrymen," with countrymen being farmers, etc. "Pays" is also homeland, so it's a fairly strong word. Le Pen could have a field day with it if he wanted to (and of course he does play on these types of fears, he has said France should get out of Europe).

Anyway, all good manifs in Paris hit the Place de la République, for obvious symbolic reasons (reaffirming the patriotism of the strikers, who claim to be faithful to the "true" values of the French Republic).


And that's where I peeled off, since they were looping back toward their starting point. But man was it hilarious. More pics are available here.

On that note, I should probably get some work done today, since I was way too busy chasing tractors all afternoon...hahahaha.