#SaccageParis, from pariah to interlocutor of the town hall of Paris

Tuesday, March 22, Quentin Divernois, one of the leaders of what is now commonly called a "movement", published on Twitter the photo of a historic bench reduced to pieces on a sidewalk, an apparent victim of road works.

The response of Emmanuel Grégoire, the first deputy of the mayor PS Anne Hidalgo, does not drag. “It is obviously totally unacceptable”, he replies, and “the service provider will be called to order”.

The weight of the 140 characters, the shock of the photos: the #saccageparis trend, which set the social network ablaze in early April 2021, has never died out, regularly revived by controversy.

It all starts with the cutting by the municipal services, mid-March 2021, of the century-old wisteria which magnified the terrace of a restaurant in Montmartre.

The town hall may have reaffirmed that the climbing plant was already dead, for the association FNE (France Nature Environnement) Paris, the services confused death and vegetative rest.

On March 21, the PanamePropre profile, run by a fifty-year-old who has since insisted on remaining anonymous, launched the hashtag #saccageparis. The success of a counter-questionnaire on Parisian aesthetics, which brings together four times more participants than the official consultation of the town hall, and the photos of a wave of waste floating in the basin of La Villette serve as a unifying element , and detonator, to the opponents of Anne Hidalgo: on April 2, the keyword appeared on the twittosphere.

"A campaign of denigration of the right and the revanchist far right", comments an assistant to Anne Hidalgo who accuses her Pierre Liscia, close to Valérie Pécresse, of being behind a "very orchestrated campaign".

“Every week, 10.000 reports are processed” via the Dans Ma Rue application, then defends the town hall.

In vain: according to the public relations consulting firm Saper Vedere, with 2,3 million tweets, #SaccageParis was the biggest digital crisis of 2021 in France.

If the town hall first spoke of "astroturfing", a marketing technique giving the impression of a spontaneous and popular movement, it then "retracted", says this Belgian firm which observes around the hashtag "a real diversity of political sides, renewed news, real images and above all a volume that does not weaken", with more than 100.000 tweets in January.

"Useful in tracking"

If the demonstrations organized by the informal movement, which was structured with a website and a federation of collectives, the Union Parisienne, mobilized little, the Hôtel de Ville therefore had to change its tone, recognizing a "taking awareness" vis-à-vis "whistleblowers".

"The movement was useful in identifying" certain dysfunctions, now says Emmanuel Grégoire for whom "SaccageParis gave a wider echo to the manifesto on aesthetics".

Restoration and protection of historic Davioud benches, end of modern so-called "Mikado" benches and tree legs called "pig pens", reinforced concrete slides and yellow studs on temporary cycle paths: all the measures announced in the framework of this manifesto by the first deputy correspond to the demands of the "sackagists".

But for the town planning assistant, if the movement includes "people of good faith", it also undergoes a "part of political instrumentalization". “To say that we are sacrificing historic street furniture is not true”, assures the elected socialist, according to whom half of the Mikado benches have already been removed.

For councilor LR Rudolph Granier, the success of SaccageParis "undermines all the mechanisms of participatory democracy in the city, all the Théodule committees". The executive "saw nothing coming", said the opposition politician.

“Sometimes (the “sackagists”) are excessive and outrageous, sometimes they are right”, weighs Ariel Weil, the PS mayor of Paris Center who encourages the protesters “to play politics”.

Author of the book "The disappearance of Paris", Didier Rykner, founder of the magazine La Tribune de l'art, who has joined the current trend, dreams of "an apolitical list which says: + we will restore, maintain, manage Paris+".