The long history of protesting with pots and pans
“At my home, saucepans and eggs are for cooking,” Emmanuel Macron said after authorities in the village of Ganges announced a ban on “portable sound equipment” ahead of a speech the French president was due to make.
The comment came amid increasingly vocal opposition to Macron’s controversial move to raise the pension age from 62 to 64, with protesters banging pots and pans to express their anger.
As he tours the country trying to mollify the population, the president has come up against large numbers of protesters using kitchen equipment to make their displeasure clear; each of them part of a proud racket-making history that stretches from France to Argentina, Algeria and Lebanon.
Banging saucepans in France is thought to hark back to a middle ages ritual in which villagers would seek to humiliate an ill-matched marriage – generally a widower to a much younger bride – with a concert of saucepans, or “casseroles” as they are known.
The saucepan’s double life as a symbol of protest took off in the 1830s after the July Revolution that led to the abdication of Charles X.
Republicans opposed to the new king, Louis Philippe, “sought to make their voices heard by borrowing from reality a customary ritual” known as charivari, or making loud noise, French historian Emmanuel Fureix explained to France Culture radio in 2017.
By the 20th century, the humble saucepan, lid, fork and spoon were taking over the streets.
In the 1950s and 60s there was potbashing in Algeria during the country’s war of independence, by supporters of the French far-right paramilitary group OAS who wanted to keep the country French.
But the pot only really began to make a racket when it crossed the Atlantic to Latin America, where the ear-splitting tradition of mass “cacerolazos” - banging pots with wooden spoons or bashing them together like cymbals - was born.
The first major breakout came in 1971 in Chile against food shortages during the regime of Salvador Allende.
Forty years later, tens of thousands of pot bangers took to the streets of Buenos Aires after finding themselves cut off from their bank savings in the midst of a severe economic crisis.
Since then the saucepan has been a tool of protest across the globe, from Myanmar to Canada. In October 2019, protesters in Lebanonhit pots and pans, continuing the ritual from balconies even as the mass protests slowed down. At anti-government protests this year in Kenya, empty pots were both a symbol of the cost of living protest and a way to make noise.
In Myanmar, where banging pots is believed to be a way to drive the devil from your home, people protested the 2021 military coop against Aung San Suu Kyi nightly with clashing metal, picking up their instruments at 8pm and finding themselves joined by the honking and pinging of car horns and bicycle bells.
Clanging pots have made a loud return to France in recent decades as a way to express discontent with politicians and policies.
In 2017, the campaign rallies of conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon drew sporadic saucepan protests, in a play on the French expression “trainer des casseroles” (skeletons in the closet).
Fillon’s “saucepans” related to a scandal that would scupper his candidacy and land him with a jail sentence, after it was revealed he had given his wife a fake job as a parliamentary assistant.
Six years later, President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension changes have elicited a new chorus of pot banging.
Pot concerts were organised countrywide on Monday evening to drown out the president when he addressed the nation after signing the bill into law.
And while the reported ban on sound equipment ahead of the president’s visit to the Herault region may force protesters to shelve their pots, smartphone apps such as “iCacerolazo” and “Cassolada 2.0” that reproduce the metal clanging suggest some won’t be easily silenced.