Outrage in the city

The symbolic American "street" — the National Mall in Washington, DC, flanked by the Smithsonian Institution museums on the longitudinal sides and on opposite ends, by the Washington Monument and the US Congress building — has literally embodied mass protest in 20th century America.

- MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

From even before the 1963 Civil Rights Movement protests (the occasion for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” address) to the war protests against the 1970’s American military action in Vietnam and Cambodia, to the demands for women’s and gay rights, the National Mall’s kilometer long stretch emerged as hallowed ground.

“America’s Civic Stage” for contesting the status quo — for proposing alternative, libertarian narratives and action — was the end point of the “The Longest Walk” from Alcatraz in San Francisco, to bring attention to the rights of Native Americans.

Paris’ Place de la République is its “street” for both mass protest and collective mourning. Actually a 3.4-hectare square (the intersection of several arrondissements), the space saw 1.6 million people congregate around its Monument à la République in 2016, in collective outrage over the terrorist attacks on their city.

This biggest demonstration in French history is only one of the habitual uses of this special place, towered over by the 1883 Monument à la République — reverentially called the Marianne, a symbol of France. Marianne holds a representation of the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789 (the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen).

The 23-meter-high monument of Marianne was installed to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the French Revolution. It calls to mind the rootedness of modern democracy — including the United States liberal version, called Jeffersonian democracy after its paradoxically slave-owning writer — in the universality of the principle of human rights. Hence in the 18th century French Revolution.

OLD SQUARES,RENEWED MEANINGS