"Caca sur Bardella": the chant of the marches, or irony as a counter-power

According to Libération, a new slogan, "joyful and childish", was widely heard on Saturday 31 October in the processions of the third day of the movement against the cost of living: "We do poo on Bardella, wee on the Nazis". The daily notes that it came from a video widely shared on social networks in recent days. The dispatch we have stops there: we do not know who produced the video, what the exact scale of its circulation is, or how many demonstrators sang it. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with what the chant is not: a programme. Nobody will claim it sorts out the price of the weekly shop. But it would be lazy to file it under playground silliness. In the war of position Gramsci described, where common sense is contested trench by trench, a song is a small piece of light artillery: easy to carry, impossible to sum up in a figure, and it sticks from the first listen.

Look, too, at the frame it overflows. The dominant media treatment of the cost of living has its habits: the economist on the set, the reasonable tone, the "teaching" of the constrained budget. The reasonable voice is always the one explaining to others that prices are a kind of weather. Dominant ideas, the Marxist tradition reminds us, are not necessarily lies: they are partial images passing themselves off as universal. Against that, a playground refrain has an advantage: it refuses the register in which it had been decided it would speak.

There remains the question of intellectuals. Gramsci distinguished "traditional" intellectuals, settled in institutions, from "organic" intellectuals, born of a class and charged with giving it consciousness of itself. Did the author of the video, whom we do not know, act as an organic intellectual? We know nothing about that, and it would be speculation to attach a name or an intention to it. Let us observe only the mechanism: a form born online comes down into the street, then climbs back into the press, which explains where it came from. The loop is complete, and it is Libération, a well-established institution, that here plays the archivist of folklore.

Still, one must keep a cool head about the medium. The platforms that circulate this irony belong to a handful of private groups, which profit from it and set the rules of its visibility. An alternative common sense born on someone else's means of cultural production is common sense on lease. Virality supplies the momentum, not the ownership.

And then there is the choice of target: the song aims at a political figure and an ideology, not at the demonstrators opposite nor at a social group. The laughter here is a weapon of precision, not of humiliating people. Whether it will last beyond the third day, or whether the refrain will fade like so many others, remains to be seen. It is by that duration, rather than by volume, that we will measure whether there is here the beginnings of a counter-hegemony, or simply a catchy tune.