“I am nothing like you, Paul. Nothing at all.”

Restaurateurs from all over France—twenty-five thousand estimated the press—came to the capital that fateful day of the demonstration, and we initially gathered at the Arc de Triomphe. The atmosphere was festive, even as media and police helicopters hovered overhead like gathering storm clouds. Young and handsome chefs in toques, oversized and towering above us on stilts, were the charming front line of our demonstration, and we aligned ourselves in orderly rows behind them.

Colorful banners—cartoons of piggish politicians and emaciated chefs, red slashes through the value-added tax rate of 19.6 percent, simple NON PLUS placards—they were hoisted here and there by the rapidly gathering crowd, while the organizers in red aprons, holding megaphones, barked orders at us from the sidelines.

We had good cause. McDonald’s meals were, for some twisted bit of political reasoning, entirely tax-free, but quality French restaurants like Le Chien Méchant had to add a 19.6 percent VAT to every customer’s bill. So in the end, dinner at my two-star restaurant, without wine but including the labor-intensive service haute cuisine is rightly famous for, cost an average 350 euros a head. The universe of customers prepared to pay that amount for a meal was, as you can imagine, rather limited and rapidly dwindling. Dropped for a few years, the VAT charge had been reinstated. So the VAT, on top of the recession, was killing our business, and already several well-known restaurants—such as the celebrated Mirabelle over in the 8th—had gone bust.

Enough. We had to fight back.

Le Chien Méchant was that day well represented throughout the twenty-five-thousand-strong column. Serge and Jacques, my right and left hands, both were near the front, arm in arm, ready to roll down the Champs-Élysées like a meaty tanker. But I was also touched to see my pastry chef, Suzanne, plus two sous chefs and four waiters, all ready to do their part. Mehtab refused to come—we were all Bolsheviks, according to her—but the accountant, Maxine, arm in arm with our waiter Abdul, was there, repeatedly looking over at me, through the crowd, with hungry eyes. Even the young apprentice Jean-Luc was willing to be counted on his day off, and, touched to see his earnest face, I went out of my way to shake the boy’s hand and thank him.

“Chef!” yelled Suzanne, waving over the protesters’ heads. “What fun!”

I was not entirely sure. Immigrants, by instinct, we like to keep our heads down. Not make waves. Furthermore, my unease was fanned that morning when I met Le Comte de Nancy Selière. The count and his West Highland white terrier were heading off to their daily rendezvous in the Jardin des Plantes when I bumped into them at the corner of Rue des Écoles, just as the dog finished his business in the gutter and was triumphantly burying imaginary dirt on his mess with aristocratic flicks of his hind legs.

The aged count was bent over and cooing—“C’est formidable, Alfie!”—when he removed the linen handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab and tidy up around his dog’s bottom. It was of course a rather awkward moment to engage the gourmet banker, but I thought it would be even ruder to pretend I had not seen him, so I cleared my throat and said, “Bonjour, Monsieur Le Comte.”

The aristocrat straightened himself and looked around.

“Aah, Chef, it is you . . . I suppose you are off to march with the proletariat.”

“Don’t put it like that, please, Monsieur Le Comte. We want lower taxes.”

“Well, I really can’t blame you,” said the count, patting his pockets, pretending to look for a plastic bag. “Perhaps we should all be doing the same. You know, it was my ancestor, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, who once noted, very sensibly I should add, that taxation was the art of ‘plucking the most feathers with the least amount of hissing.’ Totally lost on this lot. They’ve proven themselves to be rough and greedy, like provincial butchers.”

The count ignored the dog’s mess, despite the fact that a sign ordering Parisians to clean up after their animals was directly before us, and added, rather thoughtfully, as we continued to stroll down the street, “Do be careful, Chef. This government will mismanage the demonstration. Be sure of it. Absolutely no feel for finesse.”

At ten thirty that morning the morphing mass of demonstrators around the Arc de Triomphe seemed to solidify and congeal, and with a few barks from the megaphones, and some African drumming and whistles, we were off, arm in arm and chanting. I looked around as our sea of banners made its way down the Champs-Élysées, and found both Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon in the lines around me. I was literally surrounded by France’s restaurant establishment, and the sense of bonhomie was palpable.

Le Comte de Nancy’s warning suddenly seemed excessively dark and theatrical and misplaced. The sun was shining and the police looked bored; with the gawking Parisians stood wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti families, the women in burkas, scores of children at their feet, standing along the Champs-Élysées and waving.

Less than an hour later, the forward ranks of the demonstration reached the other side of the Seine, in front of the Assemblée Nationale. It was there a phalanx of helmeted riot police with shields blocked our progress, as expected, with a makeshift pen created from a crescent of steel grilles preventing our protest from actually climbing the steps of the Assemblée Nationale and disrupting Parliament. But a stage, podium, and microphone had been set up within the pen, and a series of speeches was the next stage of the planned event.

Those of us in the middle of the human colony were intent on moving into the center of the action, but as we passed the Place de la Concorde, about to cross the bridge, scores of anarchists emerged from the Jardin des Tuileries behind us, kerchiefs pulled up over their faces, slipping into our ranks.

I am not sure what precisely happened next, but rocks and Molotov cocktails and cherry bombs were suddenly whizzing through the air. The riot police, armed with batons and shields, instantly and defensively surged forward and pressed down at us from the other end of the bridge.

There was tear gas smoke and screaming, torched cars erupting in flames, and the horrible crunching sound of police bringing batons down hard on heads.

We were trapped by the police on one side, the anarchists on the other.

The battle didn’t last that long and none of my staff were hurt, nor, in fact, was anyone I knew personally; the press said, in the end, ninety demonstrators and eight police were taken to the hospital, out of a total of twenty-five thousand demonstrators, while eleven cars were torched and destroyed.

But the terror—the bloody heads and the blinding smoke and the high-pitched screaming—that was earthshaking and powerful and sobering right down to the very core. It awoke in me primordial fears from the past, of torchlit mobs bearing down on the Napean Sea Road. And when I saw the policemen on horses charge into the crowd, swinging their batons, this bubbling bile of animal panic rose in my throat and I grabbed the arm of my neighbor, the apprentice Jean-Luc, and forced him to turn with me, to run back against the crowd, toward the Place de la Concorde and the advancing anarchists.

Ultimately the anarchists pushing back forced us off to the side, down the steps leading toward the river, where, by chance, a barge was docked under the bridge. The elderly hippie couple on board were at that moment loosening their ropes to pull away as quickly as possible from the trouble overhead, eager to avoid the fiery debris that was falling from the bridge into the water below and onto their deck. But the couple saw our panic and yelled, “Ici, vite,” and somehow we jumped, Jean-Luc and I, with two or three other people, hitting the deck with a thud, just as the barge pushed off.