The carnival in Marseille comes at the end of winter. It pushes out the short nights. and lets people take back the streets.
The carnival is 2000 people masked and disguised, which dances through the streets, in total chaos of noise. There are choirs who have made a pilgrimage from Italy. There are the Brazilian drum batucada and the fanfare brass bands. Kids with flour bags blast all that moves with flour.
But a reason to protest is never far away in France. The layout of Marseille is the opposite of most cities : the rich people live in the suburbs, and the centre is run-down and chaotic. The quartier of the Plaine in central Marseille feels like it has been totally abandoned by the town authorities. The buildings are crumbling, the pavements are cracked. It is supposedly a strategy- the landlords don’t put any money into their buildings, and one day they will sell them for a fortune. In the meantime they become decrepit ; in 2020, a whole building would collapse in on itself killing 8 people. The Plaine, with its streets writhing with graffiti, its corners holding up drunks, its cheap apartments housing artists, and its market which is like stepping into an Arab souk, is coveted land. The Mayor wants to transform it, and it is slowly being strategically gentrified.
The crowd is following behind a giant paper mâché rat. He is sitting on his haunches. At his belly he holds a globe. Inside the globe is a model in paper mâché of the streets of the suburb of the Plaine. Above each apartment block is a ‘for sale’ sign. On the rat’s backside is written “we had the plague in 1720. Will the plague come back in 2017? Let’s not give in to the plague of Profit-Above-All-Else’.
The Marseille carnival ends at the Place Jean Jaures. Night is setting in and it looks like a scene from the middle ages. You see a large wooden structure high above the crowd. It is a giant balance. On one arm there is an effigy of Trump ; on the other an effigy of the mayor of Marseille. Someone has a microphone and is carrying out a judgement. The fate of politicians is weighed out to cries of blood lust from the frenzied crowd. Finally the judgement ends with Trump pushed into the bonfire below, followed by Maurin the mayor. For good measure a policeman is thrown in too.
The square lights with the flames of a giant bonfire. The bonfire draws up another few metres, above the faces of the crowd. If you don’t know Marseille or the French well enough, you realise you don’t know how to read the scene any longer and that you could be out of your depth. There is an air of total chaos and volatility, where anything could happen. And that, though it is scary, is the aim of carnival, to have a moment where anything could happen and everything is possible.
The sight of the sparks crackling up into the Spring evening, the heat flickering onto masked faces seems to push the crowd back into some ancient state. People grab hands and start running in a circle around the bonfire, until there is a whirlpool of 60 people in one direction, and another line within this going in the opposite direction, spinning faster and faster around the bonfire in a trance.
