Once behind hurling soup at Mona Lisa, activists throw ‘orange powder’ inside Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors

French climate activists recently staged a unique protest at the famed Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles by spreading orange clay powder, calling for sustainable food for all.

Two French group Riposte Alimentaire (Food Counterattack) activists last Saturday (May 4) carried out the protest that “raise awareness about growing inequalities, allowing a privileged minority to monopolize part of the resources, while the majority of citizens collect the crumbs”.

In an Instagram post, the group wrote, “The Hall of Mirrors is the indecency of a minority which monopoliz\ses power and money while the people die. 350 years later nothing has changed!”

The protesters were later arrested.

The protest’s timing

The protest comes days ahead of a May 14 debate on the Agricultural Orientation Law in France’s National Assembly. As per Riposte Alimentaire, the law is in contradiction to the vision of Social Security for Sustainable Food and makes no mention of agricultural income. The law further “favors free trade agreements and backs down on environmental measures, facilitating the monopolisation of natural resources and pushing ever more towards productivist and industrial agriculture”.

Not the group’s first protest

Riposte Alimentaire protests have targeted some significant cultural places and works, grabbing headlines across the globe. In January, they threw soup at the Louvre Museum’s ‘Mona Lisa’ painting in Paris amid ongoing protests in other parts of the country led by farmers. In a video of the incident, protesters were seen shouting in French, “What’s the most important thing? Art, or right to healthy and sustainable food? Our farming system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work.”

Next month, they threw soup at Claude Monet’s painting Spring (1872) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the French city of Lyon.

Farmers up in arms across Europe

Farmers across Europe have been protesting since many months over a series of issues, including seeking measures against foreign competition and speedier compensation for damage from natural disasters, facing high production costs and constraints placed on them by European Union measures to tackle climate change. They have also raised the issue of unfair competition from abroad.  particularly Ukraine, after the EU decided in 2022 to waive duties on Ukrainian food imports.

The discontent continues to brew as June EU parliamentary elections draw near. But European policymakers have scaled back rules to protect nature, drawn up limits on the import of tariff-free Ukrainian grains and scrapped new legislation limiting pesticide use, Reuters reported. Further, the 27-nation bloc also announced the extension of subsidy allowances by six months until the end of 2024 to support the region’s agricultural sector.

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