Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

On July 12, a collective of undocumented migrants (known in French as sans-papiers) occupied the Panthéon, a mausoleum and popular tourist site in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Calling themselves the gilets noirs, they have occupied several high-profile locations in recent weeks, even taking over a wing of the capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport. Their protests have highlighted their conditions as sans papiers in France but also the harm done by French business and military interference in their own (mostly African) homelands. In this article for Mediapart, Mathilde Mathieu and Rouguyata Sall explain how migrants who are usually reduced to the most invisible of conditions have begun to make their voices heard.

Trampled After the gilets noirs occupied the Panthéon on July 12, the undocumented migrants’ collective found themselves surrounded and even outright trampled on by the police. Some of those arrested were handed “compulsory orders to leave French territory”; fifteen of them were detained, awaiting their expulsion. But that wasn’t the whole story. This young movement of sans-papiers, which arose in November 2018 with the demand for mass regularizations, had long remained in a media blind spot. Now it claimed a “victory.” This was, firstly, a “legal victory.” The fifteen people who were detained were all freed, thanks to the aid of a pool of “anti-repression” lawyers who had been mobilized in advance of the action. One participant was called back before the courts for “public indecency.” But this was, above all, a “political victory.” For years, it seemed that undocumented workers’ struggles had been rendered invisible, as public debate instead polarized around the refugee question — that is, the matter of who had the right to asylum and who had what Interior Minister Christophe Castaner called the “vocation” to get back on the plane home. Today, with the Panthéon occupation, the gilets noirs proclaim that “the fear has passed over to the other side.” Now counting in the hundreds, they address themselves to none other than the prime minister himself, refusing to be “managed by Castaner and the police prefects.” On July 12, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe was indeed forced to react, faced with images of the (peaceful) occupation as well as the radical speeches — delivered over the tombs of Victor Hugo and Voltaire — with their talk of “France perpetuating slavery by other means.” Galvanized, the gilets noirs have announced that fresh actions are coming soon. As one active member, Houssam, puts it, “we’re ready to take action — civil disobedience.”

Who Are the Gilets Noirs? But what do the gilets noirs want to achieve? Why has their movement arisen now? And in what sense do they mark a change from more “traditional” sans-papiers collectives? Fundamentally, their aims can be summarized as follows: “We are not just fighting for papers [to be regularized] but against the whole system that produces sans-papiers.” Houssam adds: “We want to destroy all the actors in the racist system, or at least go on the attack against them.” And they’re doing so with a kind of risk-taking that’s rarely been seen in recent years. “We’ve already lived through hell in the Sahara and in Libya,” explains Camara — a well-known name in the movement, in a migrants’ hostel in Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement. “So, we won’t be giving up.” A Malian, he arrived in France only in September 2018 and is already working on building sites: “The employers pay us fifty euros a day, they profit. And if you ask for a Cerfa form [to present an application to the prefecture, requesting regularization on the basis of your work] they get rid of you and take someone else on instead. And so on and so forth.” Camara’s not the only gilet noir bearing the scars of what was once the land of Gaddafi. In Libya, almost all migrants are thrown into detention cells and camps, and sometimes traded by Mafiosi, tortured, and reduced to slavery. Nor is Camara the only one who’s survived being cast off in a raft on the Mediterranean. The French authorities endeavor to distinguish the people on these rafts who are potential refugees and those who are “economic migrants.” Yet the raft-goers all show one same face: an expression of terror. After all this, should they then have to play a waiting game in France, hiding away and begging at their employers’ feet for “a Cerfa form”? “The fear is over. If we don’t take risks, we won’t get anything,” insists Mamadou, a 21-year-old Malian who arrived in France in 2016 via Libya and Italy. Arrested in front of the Panthéon on July 12 and slapped with a “compulsory order to leave French territory” (the very first one he’s received in France), he was subsequently locked up in the Vincennes detention center before being released by a judge. “I’ll be there for the next action,” Mamadou promises. “We don’t win rights just sitting at home.” His older brother Samba, employed in the building trade, will also participate: “On the building sites, in restaurants, in cleaning, there’s no one but sans-papiers working there. It’s time the prime minister listened to us. We’re a bigger sight than the Panthéon!” Kaba also took a big risk on July 12. A 24-year-old from Mauritania, she explains how she fled abuse and a forced marriage. After arriving in France less than two years ago, she saw her asylum application rejected by the Ofpra (the office responsible for granting or denying refugee status) and then the National Asylum Rights Court (in a case that is still on appeal). If she gets checked by police, a police prefect could decide that she will be subject to “forced displacement” (as the administrative euphemism puts it) within just two hours. Kaba had already taken part in several gilets noirs actions, without getting arrested. The actions in which she participated included the one at Charles de Gaulle airport on May 19, in order to buttonhole the CEO of Air France (“the French state’s official deporter”) and the one on June 12 at the headquarters of the Elior Group, a specialist in collective catering with a reputation for hiring sans-papiers (who, a company spokesman claims, provide “aliases” when they sign up, i.e. the papers of some other person who does indeed have regularized status). This time, in front of the Panthéon, “the police asked if I had papers, and I said no.” Kaba was taken to the police station, only to be released an hour and a half later without being given a “compulsory order to leave French territory.” According to her comrades, this was just another case of the reign of “arbitrary rules.” “Thanks to the gilets noirs I’ve found work,” she points out — lining up cleaning and “garbage removal” jobs in offices from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, and then working afternoons for a perfume brand, for 500 to 700 euros a month. But what about the crackdown with which these actions meet? “We have no choice.” Some of the gilets noirs even sleep in the street. Indeed, this a novelty of the movement: while the struggles of undocumented workers have traditionally been led by solidarity networks and by West Africans (Malians, Mauritanians, Senegalese people, etc.) boasting no few years in France, the gilets noirs also include Sudanese, Eritrean, or even Afghan migrants who have only just seen their asylum claims rejected, or even been “Dublinized” (that is, they risk being sent back to the first EU country where their fingerprints were taken — an application of the “Dublin agreement” on asylum). “Among the gilets noirs there are new arrivals who are still looking for a place to put their suitcases,” confirms Anzoumane Sissoko — one of the spokespeople for the CSP 75 (a longstanding Paris sans-papier collective). “The only possibility they have is to accept any job going.” At a personal level, Sissoko — who has already been fighting for “eighteen years” — gives hearty support to the gilets noirs: “There’s 700 of them — if we joined together with the other collectives and unions, there’d be maybe 2,000 of us.” Indeed, behind this movement, we find just two organizations: most importantly, La Chapelle Debout (“La Chapelle, Stand Up!”) — an association created in northern Paris in 2015 in order to help out migrants on the streets — and Droits devant !! (“Rights First!” — a pun on “Straight Ahead!”), an association founded by figures like popular scientist Albert Jacquard at the end of 1994, not long before the months-long occupation of the Saint-Bernard church by some 300 sans-papiers. These two associations worked on their own, without either the “traditional” sans-papiers collectives (for years weakened by divisions, or even internecine struggles) or the unions who have engaged on these issues. They directly mobilized in the workers’ hostels, one by one (some forty such structures are already involved). “Yes, we took a step back from some collectives (like the Union Nationale des Sans-Papiers, UNSP) who have lowered their ambitions and now settle for deals in the police prefectures to push a few people’s files under the radar, while losing sight of the goal of a general regularization,” reports Jean-Claude Amara, a longtime leading light in Droits devant !! (and co-founder of Droit au logement — Right to Housing). “This gave us more chance of taking forward steps.”