Étienne Jarrier stopped the orchestra after teargas canisters landed in the double bass and music stand cases during a protest at Place de la République in Paris last week. The 25-year-old conductor said the musicians had to stamp out fires after the canisters hit their equipment.
Jarrier and the cases
Jarrier, the conductor and co-founder of the Orchestre du Nouveau Monde, said: "There were teargas canisters landing in the double bass and music stand cases, and starting fires the musicians had to stamp out". He added: "We’re very happy to play at demonstrations". The group was made up of hundreds of young professional and amateur musicians, all volunteers, and it kept playing after other people had disappeared from the square.
Jarrier also said: "There are lots of anthems for social struggles in France, like the Marseillaise or the International or activist music of the last centuries, but it’s important to play music that appeals to new generations." For this protest, the repertoire included The Hanging Tree from The Hunger Games and the theme from Marvel's The Avengers film, a choice that kept the set pointed toward younger audiences rather than ceremony.
Place de la République and CRS
Photographs of last Saturday’s protests showed Jarrier conducting against the Marianne monument and a dense white cloud of teargas, with The CRS riot police present in the square. The protest was the starting point for the official demonstration by high-school students, who were protesting a failing and unju'.
The clash pushed a peaceful musical performance into the path of crowd-control tactics at a major Paris protest site. For readers following the orchestra’s activist work, the next question is not its repertoire but what happened to the high-school students’ protest after the musicians were targeted.
From 2022 to last year
The Orchestre du Nouveau Monde was co-founded by Jarrier in 2022, and its history has already tracked the same mix of music and politics. It played at the foot of a melting Alpine glacier in 2022, performed outside the headquarters of the Rassemblement National two years later, and last year formed a welcoming committee outside a television station for Marine Le Pen while playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
Donald Trump Pushes $560 Million Kennedy Center Plan, National Symphony Orchestra at Center Stage and Springfield Symphony Orchestra opens Bid on the Baton at $500 for Springfield Fireworks 2026 show how orchestras can become political and civic symbols; here, the difference is that the instruments themselves were caught in the police response. Jarrier was 25 when he had to stop the performance, and the image of cases burning in Place de la République is the part that lingers.
