Football icon Cantona´s anti-bank ´revolution´ flops

Eric Cantona’s bid to destroy global banking failed Tuesday as his French compatriots ignored his call to withdraw cash en masse and it emerged his actress wife had starred in a television bank advert.

The wealthy ex-Manchester United star warned his own bank to expect a big withdrawal but there were no reports from anywhere else in France of large numbers of people lining up to take out their money.

Cantona told a BNP Paribas branch in the northern town of Albert he planned to take a break from filming a gangster movie nearby and turn up to withdraw “more than 1,500 euros,” branch manager Antoine Poissonier told AFP.

But by the time the bank closed for the day the ex-footballer had still had not made an appearance.

French and European politicians and bankers have condemned the footballer-turned-actor, saying his call for citizens to empty bank accounts to punish the financial sector was irresponsible, naive and misguided.

Yet tens of thousands of people in France and beyond had promised on social networks like Facebook that they would take up Cantona’s call to bring down the “corrupt, criminal” banking system that sparked the global economic crisis.

But by the time France’s banks had closed on Tuesday — the day Cantona suggested his anti-capitalist revolution should begin — very few appeared to have kept their promise.

“We have seen no change,” said Didier Borriello of Credit Lyonnais bank in the southern city of Marseille, Cantona’s home town, echoing reports from around France of business as usual in the nation’s banking institutions.

In Paris, members of an activist group called “Save the Rich” dressed up in striped prison uniforms and withdrew several hundreds euros from a Societe Generale branch and deposited it a nearby bank they saw as more “ethical.”

Their aim was “not to bring down the system” as Cantona said he hoped to do, but “to make it work better,” said activist Maxime Hupel, who was dressed in a red Man United jersey with “Cantona” written across his back.

But the protests were few, isolated and largely symbolic.

“I’m going to take out 500 euros, but I can’t do more,” said a woman who gave her name as Isabelle on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in central Paris.

Cantona’s failure was compounded when it emerged Tuesday that his actress wife Rachida Brakni had starred in a television advertisement for Credit Lyonnais that was widely broadcast earlier this year.

Minister for Solidarity Roselyne Bachelot was quick to point out what she said were the contradictions in the anti-capitalist campaign launched by a rich ex-football star whose “wife does advertising for the banking system.”

She noted that Cantona had himself appeared in many television, cinema and magazine ads for products ranging from L’Oreal cosmetics to Renault cars.

Cantona first made the withdrawal suggestion in October as millions of trade unionists took to streets in France to protest extending the retirement age in a series of ultimately failed protests.

“What is the system?” he asked, in a video interview with a local newspaper. “It revolves around the banks, the system is built on the power of the banks, so it can be destroyed through the banks.”

“The three million people in the street, they go to the bank, withdraw their money, and the banks collapse … That’s a real threat, there’s a real revolution,” he said in the video that went viral on the web.

“No weapons, no blood, nothing at all. It’s not complicated. Then we’ll be listened to in a different way,” said Cantona, who in a hugely successful career was once banned for nine months for launching a kung-fu kick at an opposing fan who insulted him.

European Union economic affairs commissioner Olli Rehn, once a director of a Finnish first division club, said he was a Manchester United fan, but added: “I think Mr Cantona is a better footballer than he is an economist.”