Change font size:
A Barthesian Reading
By Diana Gëllçi, Ph.D.
Tirana Times, June 30, 2026 – A beautiful protest has been unfolding in Tirana for several weeks. What is particularly interesting is that the same description has been adopted not only by the protesters themselves but also by government officials and media outlets aligned with them. “The protest itself is beautiful,” they, too, insist.
The amplification of the idea of the “beautiful protest” by representatives of the Albanian government inevitably brings to mind Roland Barthes’s famous example of The Negro’s Salute in his essay Myth Today (Le Mythe, aujourd’hui), which concludes his 1957 book Mythologies.
Barthes analyzes the cover of the French magazine Paris Match, which depicts a young Black soldier in a French uniform saluting the French national flag. At first glance, the photograph appears entirely innocent—even patriotic. Yet, according to Barthes, it functions as a myth: it presents the French Empire as natural, legitimate, and harmonious, while the soldier’s salute serves as evidence of his willing loyalty to France. In this way, the historical reality of colonialism disappears behind the reassuring simplicity of a patriotic image.
For this reason, Barthes regarded the photograph as one of the most illuminating examples of how political myths are constructed through images. What appears, on the surface, to be an innocent gesture becomes, under critical examination, an alibi for colonialism.
For Barthes, the photograph itself does not “lie.” The soldier exists. The salute exists. The myth is created by the meaning attached to the image when it appears on the magazine cover: “Look how harmonious the French Empire is.”
From this analysis, a simple definition of political myth may be derived: a political myth is the transformation of the meaning of an existing object, event, or discourse in such a way that it acquires a new political significance, presented as natural and self-evident.
In much the same way, the Albanian government constructs a public narrative that produces the myth of the “beautiful protest.” No one denies that the protest is peaceful, civic-minded, or even aesthetically beautiful. On the contrary. But the moment those in power incorporate the phrase “beautiful protest” into their own narrative, the center of meaning shifts from the question, “Why are people protesting?” to the assessment, “What a beautiful protest!”
Why?
Because this is precisely how myths work. By calling the protest “beautiful,” those in power obviously cannot change the protest itself. What they seek to transform is its public meaning. The protest ceases to appear primarily as an act of political opposition and instead becomes an expression of civic virtue—something that can be admired without being taken seriously as a challenge to political authority.
In this way, the first step is not the suppression of the protest but the transformation of its meaning: the protest is relocated from the sphere of political conflict to that of civic aesthetics. In other words, political conflict is symbolically neutralized.
In the Barthesian sense, the myth of the “beautiful protest” does not deny the reality of the protest (the protest isbeautiful); rather, it repackages it. By shifting attention away from the reasons for the protest and toward its aesthetic qualities, the discourse seeks to soften the political force of the event and render it more acceptable to those in power.
Ultimately, myth cannot extinguish a protest. What it seeks to change is its meaning. And it is precisely there that the work of critically reading political myths begins—including the myth of the “beautiful protest.”
