What Rage Looks Like When It Has No Address

Paris, January 2014. Somewhere between 17,000 and 150,000 people—the police said 17,000, the organizers said 150,000, and the lower number is almost certainly closer—filled the streets for something called the Jour de Colère, the Day of Anger, which turned out to be less a political demonstration and more a parade of accumulated hatreds looking for somewhere to land.

Catholics against abortion, nationalists against immigrants, homophobes against gay rights, antisemites doing what antisemites do, all of them unified by a shared fury at President François Hollande and, more broadly, at everything the modern world had chosen to become. Vice reporters Arthur Limiñana and Frédéric Travert were there. What they described from the Place de la Bastille sounded grim in the particular way that organized resentment always does: Everywhere were right-wingers, joking about the Holocaust, singing insults at Jews, mourning loudly for the old days.

At some point, members of the feminist group FEMEN appeared. They were pulled away by police while men in black clothes screamed slurs at them. Their clothes stayed on the ground.

Two hundred and fifty people were arrested. Around twenty police officers were injured.

The easy read is that this was organized fringe lunacy—manufactured outrage from groups that exist specifically to manufacture it—and some of it clearly was. But France was also carrying over three million unemployed in early 2014, with the government planning to spend fifty billion euros trying to restart an economy that had stopped cooperating. That’s a lot of people with real reasons to be furious at something, and some portion of them will always march toward the nearest ugly flag. The organizers know this. They planned for it.

What stays with me is the clothes on the ground. Not the speeches, not the arrest numbers, not even the scale of it. Just that one detail—specific, small, unembarrassed. That’s where the temperature of the thing actually lives.