No one loves a revolution quite like the French… or its cinema

As protesters hit the streets of Paris over President Macron’s attempted pension reforms, Geoffrey Macnab salutes a country that has always used its political uprisings as fodder for great filmmaking

Irène Jacob in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Three Colours Red’, which is being re-released in UK cinemas in April (Snap/Shutterstock)

The streets are on fire again. Protesters are smashing shop windows. Cars and dustbins are being set alight. Strikers are blocking access to the Louvre. In short, it’s just a typical day in Paris, the city of love... and of rioting.

With the French capital experiencing one of its periodic bursts of mass mayhem, it’s hard not to think of the many filmic representations of insurrectionary fervour. The violent scuffles prompted this month by Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms follow in a very long tradition of explosive unrest in France. There was the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The Paris Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government, was set up amid much bloodshed in 1871. Students and workers staged massive strikes in May 1968. Then there were the banlieue riots of 2005, when disenfranchised youths from the poor suburbs ran amok. The history of the country can be told through its protests.

Other countries have their revolutions, too, but they’re never staged with the élan that comes so naturally to the French. Only in France do farmers attack burger restaurants to protest against globalisation. Only in France do citizens react to rising fuel prices by putting on yellow vests (gilets jaunes) and mounting barricades at roundabouts. Increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64 doesn’t seem like much of a pretext for weeks of mass demonstrations, but disgruntled Gallic citizens have taken to the streets for far less than that. It’s a fair bet that filmmakers will be rallying to the cause and that there will soon be movies about the battle against Macron’s policies.