March is an endless month. On the symbolic Place de la République, in the centre of Paris, Tuesday was 43 March and Wednesday 44 March. That’s one of the ways the young occupiers of the Parisian square show that they have decided not to play the game any more, and vowed to set up their own rules.
The occupation of the Place de la République, an already emotionally charged spot with its spontaneous and ever-changing monument to the victims of the 13 November terrorist attacks, has been going on since 31 March, and still attracts large crowds. The movement, called Nuit debout, or “Night on our feet”, has become a major headache for the socialist government, which has tried without success to weaken it through a carrot-and-stick approach of policy announcements that benefit unemployed youth together with police harassment.
In an unexpected twist of history, the 2016 militants of Nuit debout have made theirs the emblematic slogan of the May 1968 revolutionary movement: “L’imagination au pouvoir”, power to imagination. In just a few days, a highly democratic movement where every decision is approved by a permanent general assembly, with no self-proclaimed or even elected leader or even spokesperson, has embarked on inventing a different society.
Everyone can speak for a limited amount of time so that no one monopolises the floor; commissions are meeting at every corner of the square to discuss the issues of the day, but also to organise food, security, sanitation and demonstrations.
And if the 1968 revolution was notable for being televised, the 2016 one is on Periscope. The video streaming application has been the star of Nuit debout: one man, Rémy Buisine, started non-stop filming of the scene with his smartphone and live broadcasting on Periscope. He reached a peak of 130,000 people simultaneously connected to his feed on Twitter or on the Periscope app, more than were watching mainstream news TV channels at the same time.
The Nuit debout has some aspects of a May 68 for the internet age, but with a major difference: the revolutionary students of half a century ago came of age during the trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of postwar economic growth, and wanted to crack open a conservative society; those of 2016 are, on the contrary, the children of 30 years of high unemployment, economic gloom and disenchantment with the way representative democracy works.
But as in 1968, it’s the middle-class kids who are in the streets, not the already disenfranchised children of the suburbs with their record youth unemployment. It’s a social divide that has been highlighted as a weakness of Nuit debout, with the risk of self-congratulatory entre-soi.
This movement didn’t come out of the blue. It was an extension of a more conventional protest campaign initiated by trade unions and youth organisations against a proposed reform of French labour laws. The government thought it had the upper hand when it managed to obtain support for a modified law by reformist unions, and hoped that the protests would slowly die down.
The occupation of the Place de la République, on 31 March, at the end of a day of protests and demonstrations against the law named after the labour minister, Myriam El Khomri, came as a surprise to politicians. Since then, they have been trying to understand why, years after Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish indignados, Paris is enjoying its own Occupy moment.
The delayed reaction of the French youth has a lot to do with President François Hollande. In 2011 and 2012, when Occupy was the rallying cry of many cities, giving rise to political movements such as Podemos in Spain, the French were looking forward to electing a Socialist president instead of the highly unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy. Why occupy when the polls will do the job?
The four years since have been painful for leftwing voters who have felt at best betrayed, and often disgusted by the ruling Socialists, to the point where all elections since have seen rising levels of abstention; four out of five voters don’t want President Hollande to run in next year’s presidential election.
The talk of Paris, for months, has been the reinvention of politics, away from traditional political parties seen as election machines but not a channel for citizens’ expression. Different forms of US-style primaries, one on the right scheduled for November, one on the left initiated by independent personalities including economist Thomas Piketty, and also one for everyone, are one of several attempts to reconnect politics and citizens.
The Nuit debout is a more radical approach to reinventing participative democracy. But that’s where the challenge lies. Every Occupy movement has shown the difficulty of translating mass support into political action, even the more successful example of Spain’s Podemos.
Still in its infancy, Nuit debout is wary of récupération – attempts by established politicians or intellectual stars, however sympathetic, to hijack the movement to their benefit. At the same time, on its own it will have difficulties going beyond the “living utopia” in the centre of the French capital.
But whatever happens, it will have sent the message loud and clear: the French political system is hopelessly alienated from large sections of its youth, and even a return to business as usual in the Place de la République will not mean the end of the trouble for the discredited political elite.