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PROTESTS

Eco-activists splash soup on glass-protected Mona Lisa in Paris

Two protesters on Sunday hurled soup at the bullet-proof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in Paris, demanding the right to "healthy and sustainable food".

Published: 28 January 2024 11:16 CET
Eco-activists splash soup on glass-protected Mona Lisa in Paris
The Mona Lisa doused in soup after two environmental activists hurled food at the artwork. Photo: David CANTINIAUX/AFPTV/ AFP.

The action, which comes as French farmers protest across the country, is the latest in a string of similar attacks against artworks to demand more action to protect the planet.

Two women on Sunday morning flung streams of orange soup onto the glass protecting the smiling lady to gasps from the crowd in the French capital’s Louvre museum, according to an AFP journalist at the scene.

“What is more important? Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food,” the activists asked, standing in front of the painting and speaking in turn. “Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work,” they said, before security staff evacuated the room.

A police source said both activists had been detained. The Louvre museum said the women had hidden the pumpkin soup in a coffee thermos.

Small quantities of food are allowed inside the museum, though eating is not allowed in the exhibition rooms.

The museum said the artwork had suffered “no damage”, and the room housing the masterpiece had re-opened to the public after closing for around an hour.

‘Civil resistance’

A group called Riposte Alimentaire (“Food counterattack”) claimed responsibility for the stunt. They said the soup throwing marked the “start of a campaign of civil
resistance with the clear demand… of the social security of sustainable food”.

They referred to a survey of 996 people last year by the Ipsos polling group that found that one in three French people were not always able to afford enough healthy food for three meals a day.

Member Till Van Elst said the group wanted the state to allow people to buy selected food items at reduced rates through a specialised social security card. Under the scheme, democratic assemblies would choose the food to be subsidised.

“We want citizens to really be able to… decide what is in their plates,” he told AFP.

Culture Minister Rachida Dati criticised the soup attack. “The Mona Lisa, as our heritage, belongs to future generations. No cause can justify targeting it,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Sunday’s action comes as French farmers have been protesting for days to demand better pay, taxes and regulations. The government has been trying to keep discontent among the agricultural workers from spreading months ahead of European Parliament elections, which are seen as a key test for President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Sunday scrambled to announce new measures as some farmers threatened to block roads into the capital on Monday.

READ ALSO: French PM to visit farm as agricultural unions vow Paris ‘siege’

Custard pie

The action at the museum follows a series of such stunts by climate activists against world-famous paintings to demand more action to phase out fossil fuels and prevent global warming.

In October 2022, two activists from the Just Stop Oil group grabbed headlines when they splashed tomato soup over the glass protecting Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London.

They complained that art lovers were more concerned with paintings than the planet.

The “Mona Lisa” has been attacked several times before.

A man threw a custard pie at her in May 2022, also saying artists were not focusing enough on “the planet”. Her thick glass casing ensured she came to no harm.

She has been behind glass since a Bolivian man threw a rock at her in December 1956, damaging her left elbow.

The glass was made bulletproof in 2005.

In 2009, a woman threw an empty teacup at the painting, which slightly scratched the case.

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PROTESTS

Two dead and hundreds hurt in New Caledonia unrest: France

Two people have been killed and hundreds more injured, shops were looted and public buildings torched during a second night of rioting in New Caledonia, as anger over constitutional reforms from Paris boiled over.

Published: 15 May 2024 09:00 CEST
Two dead and hundreds hurt in New Caledonia unrest: France

What began as pro-independence demonstrations has spiralled into three days of the worst violence seen on the French Pacific archipelago since the 1980s.

Despite heavily armed security forces fanning out across the capital Noumea, and the ordering of a nighttime curfew, rioting continued overnight virtually unabated.

Hundreds of people including “around 100” police and gendarmes have been injured in the unrest, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in Paris.

One person had been shot dead overnight but authorities were yet to establish the circumstances that led to the incident, Darmanin said, adding that dozens of homes and businesses had been torched.

The office of the High Commissioner, France’s top representative in New Caledonia, later Wednesday reported a second death in the riots, without giving any details of the circumstances.

President Emmanual Macron cancelled a planned domestic trip and moved Wednesday’s regular cabinet meeting to hold a crisis meeting with key ministers on New Caledonia, his office said.

In Noumea and the commune of Paita there were reports of several exchanges of fire between civil defence groups and rioters.

Streets in the capital were pocked by the shells of burned-out cars and buildings, including a sports store and a large concrete climbing wall.

“Numerous arsons and pillaging of shops, infrastructure and public buildings – including primary and secondary schools – were carried out,” said the High Commission.

Security forces had managed to regain control of Noumea’s prison, which holds about 50 inmates, after an uprising and escape attempt by prisoners, it said in a statement.

Police have arrested more than 130 people since the riots broke out Monday night, with dozens placed in detention to face court hearings, the commission said.

A night-time curfew was extended, along with bans on gatherings, the carrying of weapons and the sale of alcohol.

La Tontouta International Airport remained closed to commercial flights.

As rioters took to the streets, France’s lower house of parliament 17,000 kilometres (10,600 miles) away voted in favour of a constitutional change bitterly opposed by indigenous Kanaks.

The reform – which must still be approved by a joint sitting of both houses of the French parliament – would give a vote to people who have lived in New Caledonia for 10 years.

Pro-independence forces say it would dilute the share of the vote held by Kanaks, the Indigenous group that makes up about 41 percent of the population and the major force in the pro-independence movement.

Macron urged calm in a letter to the territory’s representatives, calling on them to “unambiguously condemn” the “disgraceful and unacceptable” violence.

Macron said French lawmakers would vote to definitively adopt the constitutional change by the end of June unless New Caledonia’s opposing sides agree on a new text that “takes into account the progress made and everyone’s aspirations”.

The French leader has been seeking to reassert his country’s importance in the Pacific region, where China and the United States are vying for influence.

Lying between Australia and Fiji, New Caledonia is one of several French territories spanning the globe from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the Pacific in the post-colonial era.

In the Noumea Accord of 1998, France vowed to gradually give more political power to the Pacific island territory of nearly 300,000 people.

As part of the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, all rejecting independence.

But the independence movement retains support, particularly among the Indigenous Kanak people.

The Noumea Accord has also meant that New Caledonia’s voter lists have not been updated since 1998 – depriving island residents who arrived from mainland France or elsewhere since then of a vote in provincial polls.

A New Caledonia pro-independence leader, Daniel Goa, asked people to “go home”, and condemned the looting.

But “the unrest of the last 24 hours reveals the determination of our young people to no longer let France take control of them,” he added.

The main figure of the anti-independence camp, former minister Sonia Backes, denounced what she described as anti-white racism of demonstrators who burned down the house of her father, a man in his 70s who was evacuated by the security forces.

“If he was not attacked because he was my father, he was at least attacked because he was white,” she told France’s BFM TV.

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