“The French are a people who protest. All you need for a French protest is people. Maybe you take some cobblestones from the streets to throw. Maybe you flip over cars and light them on fire.” I remembered these words of one of my former French teachers. They conjure up a very stereotypical image of protest, like the student uprisings of 1968. I thought today it would look different, but I could not guess how. I’d been living in Paris for weeks before I saw any semblance of a protest. Burning cars would have been exciting.
It was a Sunday. I was returning from Charles de Gaulle with my roommate when we emerged from the metro station, near our apartment in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, to the sound of rhythmic, almost militaristic chanting. I could not yet make out the words or understand what the crowd was saying. I was nervous and were it not for Katie, I probably would have gotten back on the metro and gone to one of my friends’ houses to figure out what was going on. Katie, more adventurous, pulled me onward and upward to the street.
“The government is threatening the future of France,” some shouted. “The family is at risk,” yelled others. Thousands of protesters were chanting. Pink banners, balloons and signs depicting an iconic family—a mother, father, daughter and son—spread like a sea across Boulevard des Invalides, reaching around the corner and as far down as the Seine. Our apartment was just two blocks from the Saint François-Xavier metro stop, but there were so many people that I could barely see one block ahead. Protesters of all ages were dressed in baby pinks and blues. I noticed that the banners, pickets, stickers and t-shirts all said La Manif Pour Tous. At least I now knew what the protest was. Or did I? I had so many questions: what did “manif” mean? Why was the family at risk? Did this have to do with some form of birth control I’d never heard of? I wanted answers, but Katie was intent on weaving through the crowd and participating, despite having no idea what it was that we were protesting for or against. Instead of making a beeline for home, we decided to try to blend in with the crowd.
I checked my phone to see if I could glean any information online, but there were so many people that my cell phone was too slow to connect to the internet or let me ask Siri. I shoved it back into my pocket and kept moving forward, so as not to get trampled. We joined the mass walking towards Les Invalides and the Seine beyond. Somewhere along the way we found ourselves holding bright pink signs with the same family logo. I quickly got rid of mine, still unsure what it meant. Nearly an hour later we had barely made it the half-mile from the metro to the Seine when we saw that the protest was rounding the corner and heading southeast towards the National Assembly. Katie and I agreed that was our cue to turn around. Easier said than done. We did not stand a chance swimming upstream in a crowd of that size; it really did feel like tout le monde was there. Instead, we drifted to the side and walked along the river until we had passed the sea of protesters and could make a left towards our apartment.
Once I got inside, a quick search told me two things. First, that La Manif Pour Tous or The Protest for All is a group that began contesting same-sex marriage laws when they were first proposed before the Senate and the National Assembly in 2012. The group’s name is an ironic reappropriation of the movement associated with that law; Le Mariage Pour Tous became La Manif (short for the French word for protest, manifestation, I was happy to learn) Pour Tous. Unlike the law to legalize same-sex marriage, this protest group was really not pour tous at all. La Manif Pour Tous lost its initial battle soon thereafter, in 2013, when the French government passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. That did not dissuade them, though; since then, La Manif Pour Tous has refocused on “protecting” the family in response to legislation that would help same-sex or queer couples adopt children and form families of their own.
I also learned that La Manif Pour Tous is often compared to the Tea Party movement in the United States in that it too is considered an extremely conservative perspective on certain issues. What did I get myself into, I wondered. I read on. Those who support La Manif Pour Tous are less concerned with defending marriage as an institution exclusively between a man and a woman than they are about ensuring that queer couples not have children. As an extension of this, La Manif Pour Tous supports creating and maintaining barriers to prevent queer couples from adopting or finding surrogates. French adoption agencies often require couples to have been married or live together for at least two years, making it virtually impossible for single individuals to adopt. Further, surrogacy is illegal in France, so people are already forced to seek out other options abroad. These barriers date back to the Napoleonic civil code of France that considers adoption to be the right of a married couple. Some argue that La Manif Pour Tous is trying to ensure that every child has a mother and a father. Others argue that it is homophobic. This it certainly is.
I called Katie into my room to tell her what I’d just learned. We stared at each other for a few seconds, in shock at our ignorance, unable to find words. Even though we had participated in a protest neither of us believed in and never would have joined if we had known what the protesters stood for, we had a better understanding of the importance that the French assign to protest as a form of active citizenship and as a forum to voice their opinions. Katie shuddered at the thought of telling her friends at home what had happened. Even though she goes to school in conservative Virginia, the protest we had just participated in was on a wholly different level. Neither of us had expected to see this protest in France, especially not in Paris, a place we both idealized as liberal. Then we laughed because as we had just learned in class, in the mid-19th century under Napoleon III, the Prefect of Paris Georges-Eugène Haussmann redesigned the city, leveling the labyrinthine medieval streets in favor of wide boulevards. This design was in part to make it difficult for protesters and rioters to take control of parts of the city as they had done in the past. Clearly, this had not stopped the French from protesting. Rather, as I looked out at the sea of protesters from the window, it seemed that the boulevards only gave them more space to fill. Not a problem for the tous of this particular manif on that Sunday in Paris.
