French people are protesting a plan to clean the Seine River ahead of the Paris Olympics with the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin, which translates to ‘I sh*t in the Seine on June 23’—and now we know why.
The French are renowned for many things—food, fashion, art—but perhaps the most inherently French thing of all is protest.
As part of the Olympic games, France has spent more than a billion dollars to clean the notoriously polluted Seine so that some of the games’ aquatic events can be held in its waters.
Of course most French people and those in the know wouldn’t jump in the Seine for all the croissants in Paris, no matter how diligently you said you’d cleaned it.
So French President Emanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced they will jump in and swim into the river together and take a dip on June 23 to show just how sparkling clean the Seine’s waters now are. Cute, right?
But why would the French want to take a big steaming dump in the river on the very day Macron and Hidalgo are taking a dip—and after all that money was spent to clean it up?
Well, many of the French are furious about how much money Macron has spent on the Olympics, given the punishing economy of recent years and soaring cost of living
Even more infuriating to many French people has been Macron’s repeated and consistent legislative attacks on retirement and other social benefits.
You really can’t blame them for being enraged at the billions upon billions of dollars Macron has spent on the Olympics while regular French people who will never be able to afford a ticket to the Olympics keep having their benefits cut amid a hugely inflated economy.
Hence, #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin was born. Whether or not the French will actually show up en masse remains to be seen; the Parisians involved would be pooping in their own water supply for starters, so it’s probably an elaborate joke.
