Mick Hartley

Lola-Fleur Whittaker – The Manchester graduate who became the face of the French riots – is interviewed in the Times.

Whittaker, a 22-year-old Franco-British student activist, has emerged as one of the faces of the protests gripping France — and she would like people in the UK to follow the French into revolt.

The Manchester University graduate — who is now doing a master’s degree in European affairs at Sciences Po, the elite Parisian political studies institute — has taken to social media to explain student grievances and been invited on television as a voice of the protests.

So, all that looting and setting shops on fire?

“I’m not saying it’s good what happened,” she says. “It’s just there was also a huge thing of solidarity going on. They were going out and just giving food and drinks and clothes to people, to homeless people, for example. There’s another side to the story.”

Of course. All those sports shops and phone shops looted – to give to the poor.

She says she left Manchester with “debts up to my neck”, that she can only afford to go to Sciences Po because she gets a grant and that her mother struggles to get by on a small teaching salary in Paris. If she had been on expensive holidays, she says, it was because she had been in a relationship with someone from a family able to pay for them.

The poor thing. Though, as Sean Thomas notes in the Spectator, Whittaker is in fact “a well-born Anglo-French influencer who posts photos of herself, looking lissom in bikinis, on boats off Croatia, on holidays in Oman.”

On Monday night Whittaker appeared on a French television program called “La Grande Confrontation.” “Vos boutiques, c’est bien mignon,” she said mockingly about the shops that were looted….“Your shops, so cute.”

Also on the program was Jhemima Sheilha. Her new shop near Place de la République, Caffé Urban Bakery, was smashed with sledgehammers and ransacked. “It’s my life, Lola”, she said. “What justifies terrorizing people’s lives?” Whittaker rolled her eyes.

Sheilha was asked by the editors at The Free Press to tell her story. I Came to France with Nothing. My Bakery in Paris Was Destroyed by Rioters:

When I arrived in France in August 1999, I did not know my father. I had been raised by my uncle and my aunt after the death of my mother, Henriette, an activist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who campaigned against the country’s former president, Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1994 she was poisoned by a member of her own family who supported the president. She was 36.

On the day I was born, one of my older sisters, who was only 3, died of sickle cell disease. My mother learned of her death as she was leaving the maternity ward. She left the hospital with a new child and a new grief to carry.

My mother did not have much money. She sold water in plastic bags at the markets, and sometimes, when she had no choice, she left my other sister and me alone. On the day my mother died, I was 4. She had gone to a political meeting, after which she was supposed to pick us up. She never came home.

After my mother’s death, I stayed with my aunt until I arrived in France to live with my father. I had never met him before. For the first few years, we lived in a 1,000-square-foot room in the Paris suburbs. It was very hard. I had been a good student, but now I was failing, and even though I was seeing a speech therapist, progress was slow.

And then, after about eight months, I think I simply told myself that I had no choice. My father traveled back and forth between Paris and Brussels, and I refused to let him leave me with neighbors, so I slept alone, made my own meals, and woke up alone. After three years in that cramped castle, we were lucky enough to move into an apartment where I could have my own bedroom.

After high school, I wanted to get into Sciences Po, but my father could not afford to pay for a preparatory course. I enrolled in a different prep class, but it wasn’t for me, so I quit, I worked, and then enrolled in law school, where I had to work to pay for my studies. Sometimes I couldn’t go to class because I was working, and I struggled to catch up on the classes I had missed.

When I was studying law at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, I met Grégory, who is now my husband. He had a bakery on Rue de Belleville in Paris. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I saw an opportunity when his staff walked out on him for no reason, or at least none that he was told. The next day, I went to the bakery, and I never left. I loved helping him so much that we decided to become partners. That is how, at 24, I became a business owner.

And now all that is over. Her business was destroyed.

In the name of what political and social demands was my shop smashed and looted? None. All I see are the deliberate acts of people who reject any form of social contract. And because I fought back, I am now accused of being the darling of fascists. I’ll let the world judge who is right.

Jhemima Sheilha’s dreams were shattered, but Lola-Fleur Whittaker will no doubt soon be off on another expensive holiday. It’s so exhausting being a full-time revolutionary.