Salut!

Salut! offers Christmas greetings. Terms and conditions apply

The festive season. A time for peace and goodwill to all men, hatchets to be buried, enemies forgiven and the misguided excused.

in that noble spirit. Salut! should rise to the occasion and present its Christmas greetings to one and all.

But there will be exceptions.

This is my list but it may be incomplete - please add your own candidates - and is in no particular order:

Genevieve Legay: painful reminders of one woman's involvement in Gilets Jaunes protest

This was one of the four articles of mine that the National (UAE) has published to mark the third anniversary of France's Gilets Jaunes protest movement. All can be seen by checking the link to my work for that newspaper at this link. My thanks to The National's editor for consent to reproduce my articles here .... 

 

                                        

With her rainbow-coloured peace flag and mild disposition, Genevieve Legay posed no obvious threat to public order when she joined an anti-government rally by the Yellow Vests in the resort city of Nice.

But what happened next, one Saturday in March 2019, made her an unlikely symbol of that French rebellion and resistance to the government and police response.

Although the details remain in dispute, Ms Legay fell during a police charge.

Read more on this subject:

France struggles to contain revival of the Yellow Vest protests three years on

 

A very French revolt: the Gilets Jaunes revisited

 

 

Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about the Gilets Jaunes protest movement that exploded across France three years ago last month. Driven initially by anger at soaring fuel prices, it developed into a much broader anti-government and especially anti-Emmanuel Macron phenomenon and led to the biggest and most violent protests seen on French streets since the 1968 Paris spring.

It eventually fizzled out, stifled by a combination of lockdown and a strong-armed police response. For The National (UAE), I talked to protesters, including an elderly woman who was badly hurt in a police charge in Nice, authors, politicians and analysts and lots of ordinary French people. Look up the series of four articles that have now appeared by going to this link

I will post the pieces here. For now, and to honour a pledge to the person concerned, here is the full transcript of my interview with one of those authors, Khider Mesloub (pictured below). It’s a bit rushed but I will properly translate the questions as I have already done with the answers, and do any necessary tidying up, when time allows. i should add that I strongly disagree with much of his analysis, especially those areas where he appears determined to sound a little like Dave Spart …