The transition to the New Year was marked by cars being set on fire across France. In Strasbourg, more than 200 vehicles were set ablaze. Burning of infidel’s cars has been a New Year’s custom in France for many years.
For the French columnist and lawyer Marie-Anne Soubré it’s better to have torched cars than riots between young cultural enrichers and police officers. Soubré concedes that she prefers to see this kind of incidents rather than riots.
Many thanks to Miss Piggy for the video translations;
Below is an editorial about the car-burnings from the news site Boulevard Voltaire and posted by Gates of Vienna;
January 2, 2020
There were burnt cars in Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Limoges, Nantes and even at my house: Le Monde has seen “nothing”?
Globalization is a wonderful phenomenon, especially for our evening life, as we used to say before. Thus Le Monde keeps you informed on a daily basis about the fires burning in Australia and the good performance of the French car market.
Fire? Automobile? Well no, the association did not wake up the editor. Nor did the smell of burnt cars coming up from Strasbourg, the suburbs of Paris and elsewhere, many regional metropolises and sometimes even small outlying towns; no, Le Monde no longer has a sense of smell, sight or a special correspondent. At the time of writing, on 2 January, almost forty-eight hours after the fact, no summary article has been published. On the other hand, Philippe Martinez, Carlos Ghosn, and Emmanuel Macron at the Angoulême Comic Book Fair are being followed closely. Cédric Pietralunga tweets the scoop on the presidential visit scheduled for the end of January. In Le Monde, we are definitely looking very far over these fumes of the 31st…
But the globalization of the world and the world according to Macron cannot prevent the reality of these burning cars, on the evening of the 31st, from coming up on social networks, via a tweet from Trump or via the videos of the riff-raff bragging about them. And the regional press can’t fail to mention them, or risk losing even more credibility.
So there was Strasbourg, as our Alsatian friend José Meidinger told you. But the West and the Southwest were not spared.
In Nantes, in the Malakoff district, at least fifteen cars were set on fire, but other areas of the city were affected, according to Ouest-France, as a police source told the daily: “We had them almost everywhere.”
In Limoges, between 26 and 36 cars were set on fire, according to Le Populaire du Centre. When questioned, the prefect’s chief of staff said that “the emergency services and the police were hard-put, in particular by the throwing of projectiles by small groups”.
In Bordeaux, too, Sud-Ouest could not hide the reality: “Tensions in Bordeaux on New Year’s Eve: cars and garbage cans burned.” The Aubiers district was particularly affected, but in fact several communes in the agglomeration were affected. The regional daily knows no more than the prefecture’s statement: “The police had to deal with tensions that began early Tuesday evening with groups of young people and resulted in car and rubbish-bin fires in several towns in the metropolis. There have been arrests following the throwing of projectiles at the police.”
Le Monde says nothing. For the time being. The regional press says a little. All that’s left are the desperate tweets from the unfortunate owners of the burned cars.
There are lawless areas in France; it’s well-known. There are also white zones, where communications do not go through, where the press does not seem to investigate, and stick to the communiqués of the prefecture. It looks like a war communication, by the way. Our journalists should think about this. There are also white periods, from 12/31, “very early”, until the 1st or the 2nd very late, we will now be asked to concentrate… I don’t know… on the wishes of Emmanuel Macron? Why not stretch them, by the way: 18 minutes, then 36, then 48 hours. Before joining the Comics Festival in Angoulême to launch his New Year with a fanfare.
Angoulême? The Charente Libre tells us that the city also had its “urban violence” and “burnt cars” on the evening of the 31st. Before looking into the hypothetical visit of our President Potemkin to the festival of bubbles, Le Monde could perhaps investigate the fumes of Soyaux, no?
But, in fact, as early as 2017 — January 4, the wake-up date — Le Monde warned us by sending out the phenomenon with a Shakespearean title: “Cars burned on New Year’s Eve: much ado about nothing”, with a sociologist to back it up: “This figure [of burned cars] is surely a symptom of something, but we don’t know what. In any case, it doesn’t explain or tell us anything.”
Haven’t understood yet?
A Roster of the Carbecues:
New Year’s Eve violence in FRANCE – city by city (Update)
Montpellier: | Two victims of stabbings on New Year’s Eve | |
Cannes: | Teenagers throw mortars and smoke on the façade of the police station | |
Vaucluse: | Always overflows and burnt cars | |
Saint Etienne: | Cars burnt down, a family including 3 children evacuated | |
Besançon: | 127 cars burned, the impoundment fire brought under control after long hours of firefighting by the fire brigade | |
Limoges: | at least 36 cars burned, firemen attacked | |
Montpellier: | kalashnikov’s heavy fire (video) | |
Montpellier: | a young woman found dead, shot in the head | |
Strasbourg and its region: | at least 220 cars burned, firemen violently attacked | |
Strasbourg: | a socio-cultural worker beaten up by fifteen “young people” during New Year’s Eve celebrations | |
Strasbourg: | Cars set on fire by “Individuals sometimes aged 10 and 12 years”. | |
Nantes: | 7 cars burnt down last night in the Malakoff district. | |
Bordeaux: | On the night of January 1st, 2020 the inhabitants of #GrandParc #MaryseBastié #Bordeaux once again victims of #Nuisances > 1 vehicle burned + 1 damaged. | |
Grenoble: | https://twitter.com/MatthieuGariel/status/1211965806113939456 | |
Ailleurs: | a supermarket and trees went up in flames | |
Vénissieux: | a dozen cars burned in the night from Monday to Tuesday | |
Limoges: | at least 36 vehicles were set on fire in several parts of the city. | |
Valence and Montélimar: | several vehicles set on fire, a security perimeter following a gas leak | |
Roubaix: | a pedestrian dies after being hit by a car | |
Toulouse: | New Year’s Eve agitated, cars and garbage cans burned down. | |
French Riviera: | several burnt cars and an apartment fire |
Source: F. De Souche.
A French news station, CNEWS, reported on the trolling of France’s President Emmanuel Macron by President Donald Trump over the car burnings in France and the Paris Climate Accord.
Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accord in 2017, stating, “The agreement is less about climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.”
Since the US withdrawal, Trump has repeatedly mocked Socialist Macron about the deal which is designed to redistribute wealth on a global scale.
Child activist Greta Thunberg summed it up when she addressed an Extinction Rebellion event in November 2018:
“…rich countries need to get down to zero emissions [of so-called greenhouse gases], within 6–12 years, so that people in poorer countries can heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructures that we have already built.”
Support our work at RAIR Foundation USA! We are a grassroots activist team and we need your help! Please consider making a donation here: https://rairfoundation.com/donate/
Add comment