French protests adopt slogan suspected of police origin

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A young man holds two placards bearing the slogan during a demonstration attended by several thousand people in Grenoble (AFP/Getty) AFP/Getty

Protesters see the slogan as both a joke and sign of resistance (AFP/Getty) AFP/Getty

The message, which awkwardly mixes Arabic and French, has been spotted at multiple protests (AFP/Getty) AFP/Getty

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A four-word slogan has become the emblem of the largest protests France has seen in years — and many of the students marching under it believe it was written by a police officer. 'Bismillah, c'est les ténèbres' — 'In the name of God, it's the darkness' — first appeared in a Snapchat message from a user calling himself Mamadou, decorated with Algerian flags, asking to be added to a student group: 'Hi, in the name of God, it's the darkness. When's the blockade, wallah, bro?'

Screenshots have circulated since early October. The impersonation was clumsy enough to become a national joke — 'such a terrible impersonation of a young person', in the words of Phèdre Quémener, a Paris high-school student who told the New York Times the phrase is also widely read as racist, since it presumes that the people who will vandalise property are Arab. Elsa Sauveroche, from Nice, told The Independent she had to Google it to check whether it was a real saying. Young people in France do mix Arabic and French every day; in slang, 'bismillah' has drifted from its devotional meaning toward something closer to 'let's do it'. Just not like this.

The police have not commented on the screenshots, and no evidence has emerged that officers broke into any group. But the Interior Ministry told the New York Times that enforcement officials may use online personas to speak with people suspected of organising unlawful activities during protests. The ministry has not addressed whether its agents sent the message, and nobody has independently verified where the accounts came from. That did not stop protesters from adopting the suspected plant as their own: Greta Thunberg used the phrase when addressing demonstrators in Seine-Saint-Denis on 13 October, according to the Italian agency ANSA, and in Grenoble a young man carried two placards bearing it at a march of several thousand.

The protests themselves started last month over classroom conditions and teacher shortages, and have since swollen into some of the worst urban tumult France has seen in years, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating over the cost of living and declining public services. Organisers claim 800,000 people took to the streets last weekend. The main student union UNEF has called fresh rallies for Saturday, the Yellow Vests — the anti-establishment movement that emerged in 2018 — have filed plans to march through central Paris the same day, and unions have pledged a general strike on November 5 after government talks ended inconclusively.

Nobody has established who Mamadou is. On Saturday, protesters will carry the words through the streets anyway.