When Emmanuel Macron presented himself to the cameras at the 60th Paris International Agricultural Show, shortly before 8 pm on Saturday, February 24, he was beaming. After a nearly disastrous morning, he had managed to inaugurate the event as is tradition and even find favor with some of the farmers there. "Who would have thought this morning that 12 hours later, we'd find ourselves here still working, moving forward?" he rejoiced, a twinkle in his eye.
Not him, anyway. The day had just dawned when Macron entered Hall V of the Parc des Expositions in Paris through a back door, protected by bodyguards. He avoided not only the pack of journalists who had been parked for over an hour at the entrance to the hall, but first and foremost the farmers who had spent the night around a brazier in front of the main entrance, waiting for him with bated breath. On the upper floors of the convention center, the president held a meeting with the heads of the farmers' unions, at a closed-door breakfast agreed upon the previous evening.
Outside the building, however, rumors of his arrival on the sly spread like wildfire, unleashing the farmers' fury. Members of farmers' unions scaled the entrance gates and entered the main hall, where the animals are shown, opening the gates to some 300 to 400 demonstrators. "The hunt for Macron is open!" some shouted. "Where is he?" yelled menacingly. They broke through the cordon of plainclothes police, advancing among the stands. Blows were exchanged, the demonstrators' whistles filled the hangar. Norman cows, panicked, pulled on their halters.
"You can't respond to suffering by sending in the [riot police]," Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin had said at the end of January, at the peak of the farmers' protests. On Saturday, however, four units of riot police, equipped with heavy helmets and shields, were very quickly deployed among the aisles to repel the farmers. And more reinforcements arrived later in the morning. "Macron resign!" chanted the farmers, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "We're walking on our heads." They sang the national anthem, La Marseillaise, whose lyrics evoke productive land and the countryside rising up to irrigate fields with "impure blood."
The revolt was as theatrical as it was genuinely angry. The demonstrators tried to push back the police barricades, like in a rugby scrum, only too happy to demonstrate their strength. The police loyally defended the "bubble," where the officials were gathered.
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