You may have heard them tinkling on Monday evening… When Emmanuel Macron was trying to get out of the trap with his speech broadcast on television, opponents of the pension reform gave themselves up to pan concerts all over the country. country to cover his voice. It was the Attac association which had launched a call for “casserolades” in front of the town halls.
Result: at 8 p.m., in Paris, Marseille, Toulouse or Strasbourg, in “more than 300 gatherings”, according to the anti-globalization NGO, thousands of demonstrators, including activists from La France Insoumise, walked around banging on their pans… A more festive way of making your anger heard, when the pension reform has just been promulgated? It is in fact an old tradition that is resurfacing. Because casseroles come from afar…
The sequel after the ad
Charivaris and Revolution…
In France, they go back rather, in their politicized form, to the beginnings of the July Monarchy in 1830. At the time, it was the Republicans, opponents of the regime of Louis-Philippe, who beat their pots and utensils . They borrowed, as the historian Emmanuel Fureix recounted in a fascinating interview on France Culture, to a popular tradition of the Middle Ages: the charivari. That is to say a concert of saucepans, rattles, cries and whistles, which it was customary to organize to express one’s disapproval of an ill-assorted marriage.
Under Louis-Philippe, the political hullabaloo aimed “deputies close to the government of the time, a government back to order, and then also prefects, therefore the state apparatus”, writes the researcher. Adolphe Thiers, accused of having betrayed the ideals of the Revolution, will struggle for several days in a row with concerts of cauldrons and utensils of all kinds. At a time when there are only 200,000 voters in the country, the casserole is the mode of expression of those who have no voice in the matter. The saucepan is the instrument of the sans-grade. A tool to control its representatives. In the nearer past, it was the instrument of the Pieds-noirs favorable to French Algeria against the policy of General de Gaulle: at the end of the 1950s, it was the supporters of the OAS who organized casserolades.
Chile, Iceland, Quebec…
In Latin America too, the casserole has its own history. In Chile, at the beginning of the 1970s, it was initially the opponents of Salvador Allende who inaugurated the pot concerts. The bourgeoisie of the upscale neighborhoods then protested against the socialist government’s tax increases. Concerts of the same type will then take place under the dictatorship of General Pinochet in the 1980s, in poor neighborhoods this time.
Since those years, the casserole has been exported almost everywhere and very easily. It resounded in Argentina, when the economic crisis hit in 2001. When Iceland saw its major banks go bankrupt at the end of 2008, Icelanders would find themselves pans in hand every Saturday in front of their parliament: it was the Icelandic revolution, also called “pan revolution”. Four years later in Quebec, the same utensils will be the music of the “maple spring”, a student movement against rising tuition fees. In 2019, they were still out during the uprising of Chilean students against the rise in the price of the metro ticket.
