The various convoys organized to challenge the decisions of the government succeeded on Saturday in reaching the Champs-Élysées, quickly triggering the intervention of the police to disperse them.
Some of the thousands of opponents of the vaccine pass, whose convoys were heading for Paris, managed to reach the Champs-Élysées on Saturday, quickly triggering the intervention of the police to disperse them, and mingled with the anti-pass demonstrations allowed. A heterogeneous gathering of opponents of President Emmanuel Macron, the vaccine pass and “yellow vests”, those who call themselves “freedom convoys” have been formed on the model of the mobilization which is currently paralyzing the Canadian capital Ottawa.
Cars, motorhomes and vans left Nice, Lille, Strasbourg, Vimy (Pas-de-Calais) or Châteaubourg (Ille-et-Vilaine), traveling for two or three days at reduced speed on secondary roads to reach the capital city. Among the disparate instructions circulating in the movement: a call to rally on the Champs-Elysées.
Clashes and arrests
Around 2:00 p.m., more than a hundred vehicles had joined the avenue, motorists, some now on foot, waved flags or chanted “freedom”. The situation then became tense: the Place de l’Arc-de-Triomphe then the Avenue de Champs-Élysées were gradually evacuated by the police with tear gas.
Jérôme Rodriguez, one of the figures of the “yellow vests” and active support of anti-sanitary measures convoys, was arrested near the Elysée, we learned from a police source. He was arrested as the organizer of a demonstration banned by the Paris police chief, the same source added. A known figure in the “yellow vests” movement, Jérôme Rodriguez claimed to be on social networks as one of the organizers of anti-sanitary measures convoys, self-proclaimed “freedom convoys”. He was arrested near the Elysée, at the corner of rue Duras and rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
“We had been in Paris since 5:00 p.m. yesterday, like a Trojan horse. We were invisible, we wanted to blend in with the crowd. I am + yellow vest + but there are a lot of first-time demonstrators,” Laure 57 told AFP. years old driving school instructor in Seine-et-Marne “against the vaccine pass”, fleeing tear gas. Like many protesters, she declined to give her name.
purchasing power
Other people who came with the anti-pass convoys and claiming to defend “freedom” but also purchasing power, also joined the traditional demonstrations to protest against the vaccine pass authorized on Saturday in Paris. At midday, a few hundred people gathered at Place d’Italie for a demonstration of “yellow vests” which was to move towards Place de la Nation. In the procession, in the middle of some French flags, Jean-Paul Lavigne, 65 years old including 40 years of factory, came from Albi in one of the “convoys of freedom” Thursday.
Holding an Occitan flag, he explained that he wanted to demonstrate against the increase in fuel, electricity, food, but also against vaccines, “a lie from our government”, which he accuses of being “there to rob us, to impose Chinese-style control”.
“All with the convoys”, we heard over a megaphone in another rally, that organized by the movement Les Patriotes de Florian Philippot, place du Palais Royal. Aurélie M., 42, executive assistant in the Paris region, unvaccinated, is sorry to “no longer be able to take the TGV despite self-tests but to be able to take line 13 of the metro, crowded”. “There are a lot of unfair inconsistencies,” she denounces.
“Anger”
Porte de Saint-Cloud, traffic had been very disrupted at the end of the morning by the police, who checked motorists before letting them leave in a concert of horns, noted AFP journalists. At a gathering point in the forest of Fontainebleau, around 400 vehicles were parked at midday according to a police source. In the capital, nearly 7,200 police and gendarmes were deployed, according to the prefecture, which indicated that it had arrested 14 people at 3:15 p.m.
Prime Minister Jean Castex has promised to be inflexible in the face of the movement. “If they block traffic or if they try to block the capital, you have to be very firm”, he insisted on Friday on France 2. “We are all collectively tired of what we have been living for two years” , President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with the daily Ouest-France on Friday. “This fatigue is expressed in several ways: by disarray in some, depression in others. We see a very strong mental suffering, in our young and old. And sometimes, this fatigue also results in anger. I hear it and respect it”. “But”, he added, “I call for the utmost calm”.
“Lie”
The ban on gathering convoys was upheld on Friday evening by the Paris administrative court, which rejected two appeals. “The right to demonstrate and to have an opinion are a constitutionally guaranteed right in our Republic and in our democracy. The right to block others or to prevent coming and going is not,” said Jean Castex. .
Two months before the presidential election, the government says it plans to lift the vaccination pass by the end of March or the beginning of April and intends to abolish the obligation to wear a mask as of February 28 in places where the pass is required.
Any reproduction prohibited