Art or anti-Semitism? Yellow vest anthem hits bum note
A jazz singer whose song has inspired the French ‘‘yellow vest’’ movement has become embroiled in an anti-Semitism row after racists embraced her lyrics.
In three days, more than half a million people have watched the video in which Marguerite Laissy, 28, wearing a yellow vest, dances on a rural roundabout singing satirical lyrics set to the music of a 1975 hit by Michel Fugain called Les Gentils, Les Mechants (The Nice and the Nasty).
Laissy’s family and friends dance with her as she derides French President Emmanuel Macron, bankers and Europe as the scourge of the hard-working poor.
The nice guys of France’s post1968 protest generation, now in power, have become the nasties oppressing says.
The singer, known simply as Marguerite, has gone on the defensive after her words were cheered by racist supporters of the poor, the song the grassroots gilets jaunes movement and condemned in Israel as anti-Semitic.
The offending line is ‘‘ENA, Rothschild and Bercy are the nice guys’’ – a reference to Macron’s past at France’s elite civil service college, the Jewish-owned investment bank, and the finance ministry in the Bercy district of Paris.
The row reflects the culture war around a leaderless movement that is seen by many in Paris as a band of philistines.
Marguerite, the child of a middle-class family who has made a mark in jazz and theatre circles in the past two years, has crossed a cultural frontier by singing her support for a movement Macron has dismissed as an anti-Semitic ‘‘hate-filled mob’’.
‘‘I was struck by the way the media smother the arguments of the gilets jaunes and insult their intelligence,’’ she said. ‘‘I found their demands very intelligent and thought-through. They have been demonised by the media.’’
Marguerite wrote the new lyrics, and roped in her family over Christmas for the video.
In the original song, which celebrated the cultural revolution of the time, the gentils were the poor and the mechants were the rulers. ‘‘I saw how far things have been reversed in 50 years,’’ Marguerite said.
The singer, a mother of two, fuelled the row by singling out for criticism on Facebook two prominent French thinkers who are Jewish: Bernard Henri-Levy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Both veterans of the 1968 protests, they are often targets for anti-Semites.
Marguerite said she cited them because they had shown contempt for the yellow vests, and she mentioned the Rothschild bank because it had employed Macron.
‘‘Anti-Semitism is completely foreign to me. You have to watch this clip with the humour that is present in all my songs.’’