Up All Night

For the past two weeks a strangely amorphous protest movement called Nuit Debout (Stand Up All Night) has been disturbing the streets of Paris at ungodly hours, conducting all-night open-air assemblies in the iconic Place de la République, and generally making known its dissatisfaction with the state of things. It all started back on March 31. For several months a more recognizable Left had been protesting France's proposed liberalization of its labor laws, and as often happens, Paris's students, both lycée and université, joined the marches. Then on the 31st, at the end of a big march in the pouring rain, a group, of young protestors decided to continue the protest by camping out at République--and never stopped. Sometimes a few thousand, sometimes a few hundred, they have been there for fifteen days and counting. They debate and dance and listen to music. They hold assemblies and vote on procedures and address organizational questions. They give lots of speeches and think up better ways to run society.

Comparisons with Occupy Wall Street have naturally been proposed. The improvised but very open democratic forms, the chaotic and all-inclusive rhetoric, the naive goodwill all resemble those days and nights in Zuccotti Square before Bloomberg called the cops. A closer parallel is perhaps the Indignados movement in Spain a few years ago: the protest against inequality and especially the deplorable unemployment that plagues young adults in Spain and France and most of Europe is a common theme. But while the Indignados formed a political party and scored a modest success in Spain's elections last winter, it's not clear that Nuit Debout aspires to that sort of official clout. 

Perhaps the clearest precursor, as many of the debouters themselves are saying, is the May 1968 movement, when radical students and their allies came close to bringing down the 5th Republic. Debout is just a tiny speck compared to May '68 (though all such movements start small), but both are partial to expressing rather generic utopian desires, rather than any specific program. What strikes me most about the interviews with young people in République is their rather inarticulate diagnosis of the ills they protest, and the absence of clear solutions. Anything and nothing seems to be on the agenda--a general notion that life as it is is insufferable, so that even a night in the rain, with hundreds of comrades, is preferable to just going home. 

Is this another step in a sequence of inchoate, anarchic resistance to global capitalism, from the G-7 protests and social forums to Occupy in all its manifestations, to the Indignant movements in various European cities? Or just a spring outing, a fad that will soon go its way? The New York Times has recently acknowledged Debout's existence--a benchmark of sorts. More seriously, there are some efforts underway to bring the movement to the cités, the huge suburban housing projects where the children and grandchildren of immigrants, many of them Muslim, have far more serious grievances than the labor laws or the malaise of Paris's jeunesse dorée. A protest, much less an uprising like the 2005 riots in the banlieues, particularly in this climate of terrorist threats and state of emergency, would be serious indeed.

So I'm not sure what to expect of Nuit Debout, though I think it's worth keeping in view. To my American eyes it suggests affinities with the "Feel the Bern" surge among young people here, where the practical outcomes may be similarly elusive (though the program--elect Sanders--is far more coherent). But maybe the really important thing is still in gestation: the refusal of a rising generation of post-industrial, post-modern, post-political activists to accept the givens of inequality, climate destruction, and a certain anomie. Among the many destabilizing forces at work in France, the US, and all over, this one may represent an imaginative and resonant call to action.