People are willing to defecate in the river Seine. It speaks to the political malaise that is polluting France, writes Lucy Kenningham
In 18th century France, the rebel-prone public’s punishment for heads of state was the guillotine. In 2024 it’s a stream of sh*t. Or rather, it would have been – if President Emmanuel Macron and mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo hadn’t got wind of the feculent conniving.
You may have heard – it’s news in Britain due to our own waterways being soiled on a near-daily basis – that Paris has been planning on making its city-defining river “swimmable” in time for July’s Olympic Games. This is part of a campaign to host the first ‘Games Wide Open’ Olympics, which entails hosting part of the triathlon in the Seine (lane-style swimming events will still be held a la piscine).
Despite the Seine appearing to the naked eye infinitely greener than its miserably mud-coloured cousin the Thames, it is not free of bacteria, a certain amount of garbage and other nasty substances. As such, the cost of the cleanup has not been negligible – 1.2bn euros at a time when France’s economic outlook is uninspiring and many people feel, justly, left behind.
On top of that, the cost of the games themselves has not gone unnoticed in a country still fuming from Macron’s bitterly contested, and ultimately forced through, raising of the pension age and where many people feel left behind. Farmers protests and the gilet jaunes movement have burned on for several years. The malaise came to a head a couple of weeks ago when the far right Rassamblement National (RN) declared victory in the European elections and Macron announced a shock dissolution of parliament, prompting fresh legislative elections to be held in two rounds from this Sunday.
So, sensing an opportunity too good to miss a hashtag took hold upon Macron and Hidalgo’s announcement of a victory swim in the Seine to celebrate the iconic river’s swimmability. It read ‘I’mPooingInTheSeineOn23June’ (in French). What perhaps started off as a joke became more serious when smaller, anti-establishment organisations took ahold of it. One spokesperson for the pro-poo movement told Actu France: “The problem is that all the resources that have been invested have not been to resolve all the social problems we have. We have the feeling of being abandoned.”
“We see where their priority was,” he added, darkly. Inequality has in France, like other countries in Europe, been rising. Macron has not appeased these groups, who do not align with his international-minded, centrist approach, an approach which is embodied in France’s hosting of the Olympic Games. Duly, many of the most vitriolic social media Seine sh*tting advocates are supporters of the RN.
To make matters worse, with all that money spent and just five weeks until the games begin, recent tests have shown that the level of E.coli in the Seine have hardly dropped despite the expenditure. They remain alarmingly high and fall short of Olympic standards.
On Friday, three days before the planned plunge, Hidalgo and Macron cancelled the event citing “political reasons” – presumably due to their understandable desire not to be submerged either in merde or E.coli. They have not yet set a new date – and with the games starting on 30 July it is unlikely the Seine will be cleaned in time. The rebel poopers likewise took a rain check, although it’s unclear whether any of the downriver sh*tters performed their defecation before the cancellation was announced. Many were bummed out. One would-be soiler remarked on X: “what are we gonna do with all the sh** we’ve stocked up in our arseholes?”
There is of course a darker side to the planned poo parade. One French teacher shakes her head with concern: “I find it in very bad taste,” she says, visibly upset. “It is very violent.” And she is right: to defecate in plein air, to publicly humiliate oneself, it is a sign of a corporeal level of anger that is beyond typical political demonstrations. The act necessitates an immense amount of anger, bordering on hatred. “This is a dark time,” a French city planner tells me. “We are at a turning point.”
When Macron, typically grandiose, called this election he said he wanted to demonstrate his “confidence in our democracy, in letting the sovereign people have their say”. But the people, as this distasteful episode shows, are full of rage. There’s been no mass pooing as yet, but the body politic is viscerally unwell, and the waters in France are soiled. All does not bode well.