gilets jaunes...deja vu?

I listened to the Earful Tower's podcast live from Paris last Saturday earmarking the 20th Saturday that the gilet jaunes demonstrated.  Oliver Gee is the Earful Tower is a lanky Australian living in Paris who podcasts for a living. He even podcast his honey moon with his wife on their scooter trip to Scandinavia.
Last year Oliver took me on his scooter so we could clock how long it took Aimée to get from her apartment on Ile Saint-Louis to her office. - more fun than a barrel of monkeys, too.
But Oliver's podcast on Saturday highlighted how for Parisians who live here it's a fact of life these days and people work around it. The violence you see on the news happens but it's magnified in the press.
Oliver's thoughts mirrored a section in the book I'm re-reading right now.

Paris-Underground by Etta Shiber was published in 1943 and I happen to have a 1st edition. Etta, an American, wrote this book after she was released from a French prison in exchange for a German female prisoner in 1942. The book reads like a thriller and it was true.

  Etta was sixty-five years old and a widower who'd moved to Paris in the 30's and lived with Kitty, her British friend. Amazingly she and Kitty who were neither spies and both retired, smuggled more than 150 British airman out of France after they'd been stranded at Dunkirk. Their pipeline worked until the Gestapo found out. Kitty was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp and survived.

Etta was moved around to several prisons. One of her cell mates, Louise, was a  cook whose 'profession' was to get hired by wealthy families to be their chef and then steal them blind. Louise scoffed at Etta for being 'political' and to her Nazi's were just like the hypocritical families she'd worked for. She'd call it a balance of power and her profession was to be an honest appropriator in the distribution of wealth. Etta reflected 'Set a thief to catch a thief, I remembered. Maybe Louise wasn't so far wrong. Maybe some persons inside the French state had done what she did inside a family.'
In the Cherche-Midi prison below Etta recorded a conversation with Louise:

'What difference does it make to me whether I get chased by French cops, or German cops? I end up in the same jail don't I? What difference does it make to the big shots either? You don't think this is a real war, do you? Maybe it was different last time, but you can't make me think the German army pushed us over in six weeks. It was fixed all in advance. Some of the rich people fixed it up. It's their racket. I steal a little silverware here and there, and you try to preach to me. The big shots steal the whole country, and you think you ought to get into trouble trying to save it. Wake up, kiddo. You weren't born yesterday, were you?'

1943 doesn't sound that different from 2019.

Cara - Tuesday