In the latest phase of the recent French demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, one of the most widespread protest practices was that of banging pots, pans and other kitchen utensils, interrupting dozens of speeches and visits by ministers to schools and factories. The practice of using pots as social justice tools is called casserolade in French, from the word meaning “casserole”, but is better known with the Spanish word saucepan. And it has a history that begins in the Middle Ages.
at casserolades several articles have been devoted to France, Also in international newspapers. Some have compared them to the yellow vests, another object in common use and available to all that characterized the demonstrations that began in France in 2018 against the rise in the price of diesel and petrol. And there are those who have explained its meaning through the testimonies of the people who have chosen this method of protest. A French woman interviewed by New York Times For example, she said that pots are for her the symbol of a wider social struggle: to be able to put food on the table at the end of the month.
The pension reform was approved amidst strikes and protests and through a constitutional article which avoided the parliamentary vote, helping to create a social crisis in France that would be difficult to overcome in the short term and opening what some commentators and politicians have defined as a “crisis of democracy”. Christian Salmon, journalist of Slatetherefore has told how the sound barrier created by the noise of the pans perfectly represents the refusal of negotiation and dialogue. And how, not only symbolically, he registers its failure: «The desire to deafen and respond with noise reflects a sort of discrediting of political discourse. When it is no longer possible to dialogue with the government, its voices have been covered up”.
Demonstration against Emmanuel Macron, Paris, April 17, 2023 (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
The casserolades, taking the place of the burning of dumpsters on the French streets, have also subtracted ground from the criticisms made, by those who are against the contents of the protest, of the protesters’ methods. And, says Salmon, they have created “a grotesque imaginary of power.” The prefects they issued decrees against «sound amplifying devices» and dozens of policemen in riot gear were seen confiscating saucepans, ladles or surround and tear gas on small groups of people with a wooden spoon in hand.
Despite the confiscations, the protests with the pots continued: applications were born for phones such as cacerolazo and Cassolada 2.0 (which mimic the sounds of banging pans) as well as gods siti who have created a playful ranking of noisy actions with the aim of giving visibility to that same mobilization.
Macron has commented on the practice of beating pans several times. For example, he said that “pots won’t keep France going” and Cristel, a French manufacturer of pots, told him answered on Twitter: «Monsieur le Président, at @cristelfrance we make pans that carry France forward!!!». After that Macron has declared that “the demonstrators are not trying to talk but to make noise” or, Stillcontemptuously that “eggs and pans are for cooking at home”.
The story of the saucepan dates back to the Middle Ages: at the time the custom was called hullabaloo and had the objective of expressing collective anger or mockery against individuals held responsible for acts offensive to common morals (widowed men who remarried young women, for example). It consisted of gatherings of people using various utensils causing noise outside the home of the person to whom the protest was addressed. Sometimes the ritual ended in a reconciliation. But the hullabaloo already in the Middle Ages it could also have political values and express a feeling of dissatisfaction with the established order.
The political turning point of the practice arrived in France in 1830 under King Louis Philippe I, when a national campaign was organized which lasted several days and which consisted of banging pots and pans during the night under the windows of politicians’ houses to ask for greater freedom and extension of the right to vote. One of the main newspapers of the time in support of the regime, the Journal of Debates, it defined il hullabaloo like «universal suffrage set to music: it is incapacity and ignorance that set themselves up as rights; they are institutionalized confusion and disorder.
1831 caricature of Grandville, 19th-century French illustrator and caricaturist
those pots, has explained the French historian Emmanuel Fureix, were everyday objects that became «instruments of popular justice, a means of expression for people who had no say in the matter». Through that practice they operated a reversal between public and private: not only did they use a domestic object in the public space, but they violated the private space of those who made politics since the “concerts” took place at night under their windows. Politicians were therefore humiliated in their private space, while people formally excluded from public and political space occupied it.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the shapes of the hullabaloo were replaced by cazerolazo, that is, becoming an organized political practice. In Chile, pot concerts were used by opponents of Salvador Allende, democratically elected president in 1970 and ousted by a coup d’état in 1973 that brought the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet to power for seventeen years. The first demonstration was organized on December 1, 1971 in Santiago, the capital, fifteen months after the election of Allende and, above all, during the long official visit of Fidel Castro, prime minister in Cuba.
As historian Margaret Power recounts in her 2008 book Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, the originality of this saucepan is that it was an initiative of only women who belonged to the Chilean upper middle class and who were supported by the main right-wing parties and movements in the country. In that precise context, the empty pot that was shaken for fear that with Allende the food would run out only underlined the traditional role of the woman as angel of the hearth and of the kitchen, while the men who escorted them during the event maintained their role as protectors of the “weaker sex”.
At the time, the Chilean group Quilapayún wrote a song to mock that protest. In the text it is said that «the right has two pots»: a small, new one that has just been bought to go to the demonstration and a large one that has remained at home and is full of roast meat and potatoes.
In Chile, the protest with the pots was later directed against Augusto Pinochet and during the 2019 anti-government demonstrations against the conservative president Sebastián Piñera (again a song was made, “Cacerolazo”in Ana Tijoux).
It has been used in Argentina since the 1980s and onwards against the government by Cristina Fernandez Kirchner in the 2000s, but also in Iceland in 2009, in Québec during the student demonstrations of 2012, in Turkey, in Myanmar, in Puerto Rico, in the days of the referendum for the independence of Catalonia in 2017, in Morocco, in the Philippines, in Burkina Faso and in many other countries of the world and for always different.
Il saucepan however, it took on a less generic meaning in the protests of feminist movements, above all in South America and then elsewhere. A Uruguayan feminist newspaper founded in the early eighties is called own The pot: the name, it was said in the first issue, derived from an exercise in linguistic re-appropriation. The casserole was the symbol of the education that women received and that of the domestic space to which, “according to nature”, they were destined.
The feminist movements had decided to take that symbol and decontextualize it, overturning its meaning and making the pot an instrument of protest for their claims. With this precise objective it is used today, together with many other kitchen tools, in the feminist caserazo.