Striking images have emerged from last weekend’s protests in France: vast crowds of peaceful demonstrators, the historic town hall of Limoges in flames, looting, violence, and an orchestra being teargassed mid-performance in Paris’ Place de la République.
Looting and violence often allow politicians and the media to recast all demonstrators as “rioters”, or casseurs as the French would say. In this article, a journalism expert unpacks the ways that Europe’s politicians are using the protests to suit their own ends – and how Gen Z students are teaching us all what mass protest means in the internet-powered “age of viral spectacle”.
We’ve also interviewed a sociologist about the figure and history of the casseur in France. The category is deliberately vague and constantly shifting, and often serves to obscure the real reasons why people took to the streets in the first place.
Elsewhere, we debunk the myth that Europe has been spared from the fentanyl crisis by the moral codes of kindly, upstanding mafiosi. And in the UK, researchers have unearthed a new species of European dinosaur – not in the ground, as you might expect, but buried in a London museum’s vast fossil collection.
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