The pans, in general, it is the political leaders who drag them, like cannonballs. So François Fillon: when the “Penelopegate” broke out in February 2017, the right-wing candidate for the presidential election tried to continue his campaign, but his final trips were accompanied by concerts of saucepans, “casserolades”.
These are the same noisy demonstrations that now welcome Emmanuel Macron, such as April 19, in Muttersholtz (Bas-Rhin), where the demonstrators were kept at a distance. “It’s not saucepans that will move France forward”, replied the Head of State in front of journalists, assuring that “the reality of the whole country is not only those who make noise with saucepans or who groan”.
A year after the start of his second five-year term, the President of the Republic seems entangled in pension reform. Since it was promulgated, part of the popular opposition has been determined to show that it no longer wishes to listen to the head of state: Monday, April 17, the president’s televised address was greeted by concerts by pans. Attac, which had appealed to these “casserolades”, published a map listing 374 gatherings across France. Continuing the culinary metaphor, the anti-globalization organization wrote the following day: “The people are boiling, Macron is cooked!” »
A regularly used mode of action
This recourse to pot concerts is not new. On May 1, 2020, due to the health crisis and confinement, La France insoumise had organized a virtual “casserolade” to denounce the government’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The “rebellious” had already launched a similar initiative in September 2017, their leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, calling for an “operation pans” against Emmanuel Macron’s “social coup d’etat”.
The previous year, in full mobilization against the labor law, the feminist Caroline de Haas had launched the petition “Labour law, no thank you”, claiming more than a million signatures. She had proposed to extend the movement, drawing inspiration from the Nuit Debout movement with the “Casseroles Debout” operation. On June 17, 2016, it materialized with some 350 rallies.
Another, older example on the left: in the summer of 2003, when the anti-GMO activist and trade unionist José Bové was imprisoned after being sentenced to ten months in prison for the uprooting of transgenic rice plants, the Confédération paysanne announces its intention to launch a “hunt for ministers” and to welcome on June 30, in Grenoble, with a lot of “concert of saucepans”, the Keeper of the Seals, Dominique Perben, who is to come to inaugurate the courthouse.
The far right, for its part, rarely makes noisy use of its cookware. In 1996, elected representatives of the National Front of Ile-de-France are however under the windows of the mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, in order to denounce his questioning in several cases with blows of utensils on pans.
The casserole concerts also marked the end of the French presence in Algeria, at the end of 1961. At the call of the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), it is a form popular protest of the Pieds-noirs favorable to the maintenance of French Algeria, against the Gaullist policy of self-determination and the independence of the country. Europeans in big cities start banging like deaf on a saucepan, a basin, even the roof of a car, to the rhythm of three short and two long: ti-ti-ti-ta-ta, for “Al -french g-rie”.
From the charivari of the Middle Ages to Louis-Philippe
In the middle of “Penelopegate”, the historian Emmanuel Fureix, specialist in the 19th century, had already put these “casserolades” into perspective during a program on France Culture. He explained that the phenomenon dates back “to the beginning of the July Monarchy, in the 1830s. It was essentially the Republicans, opponents of the Louis-Philippe regime, who sought to make their voices heard, in reality borrowing from a customary ritual well known to ethnologists, called “charivari”. “Since the Middle Ages, ill-assorted marriages were greeted by these thunderous concerts of pans, recalled the researcher. In 1832, Adolphe Thiers, accused of having betrayed the ideals of the Revolution, had thus been “charivarised” for several days in Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles, Brignoles and Toulon.
The historian added that the phenomenon spread throughout the world, “including in Canada, from the years 1830-1840: at the local level, civil servants or hated local authorities can be welcomed by such charivaris” , then in South America, under the name of cacerolazo. In Chile, in 1971, the right organized a demonstration against President Salvador Allende. “Initially, it was women from well-to-do, right-wing backgrounds who came out with pots in the streets to denounce the food shortages allegedly caused by the socialist government,” said Marcos Ancelovici, a sociologist of social conflict at the University. from Quebec, in Montreal, to the Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps. These forms of protest are found in Argentina, in 2008, in 2012, in Quebec, in Spain, but also in Africa, in Burkina Faso, to demand a drop in the price of fuel at the pump, in Senegal and in Algeria.