A New Generation’s Anger Resounds From a Packed Plaza in Paris

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/world/europe/france-nuit-debout-protests-paris.html

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PARIS — There are denunciations of “speciesism,” of multinational corporations, capitalism, G.M.O.s, the police and nuclear power. There are pleas for Julian Assange and African workers. There are drumming, guitar playing, free soup and 20-somethings swigging beer.

A jolly ragged man, unsteady on his feet, takes the microphone to denounce “words, words, words.” Another announces, mysteriously, “We’ve got to be on the side of the dominated!”

This is France’s newest political movement, open every night to the public on a main square in Paris, the Place de la République, which has been transformed into a giant outdoor sit-in recalling the demonstrations of May 1968 in multicultural form.

The plaza has been packed with young people every night for nearly a month, venting their anger — at just about everything. The news media here cannot seem to get enough of the movement, which calls itself Nuit Debout — or “Night, Standing Up” — a phrase some in the movement say is inspired by the 16th-century writer Étienne de La Boétie’s line, “They are only tall because we are on our knees.” Others say it comes from the “Internationale,” the hymn of the 19th-century revolutionary left.

But the movement is more than just a freewheeling free-for-all of inchoate frustration.

On Thursday night, the protest at the Place de République took a violent turn as police arrested several dozen demonstrators when they refused to disperse at midnight. Some of the protesters threw blocks of concrete and glass bottles at the police, who responded with tear gas. At other protests across France, 24 police officers were injured, three seriously.

At a moment when disgust with mainstream parties is high, the movement is also being observed warily by the country’s politicians, who recall how such citizen protests led to potent political parties in Spain and Italy.

The French movement was born in anger at the government’s attempt to overhaul France’s ponderous labor code, in hopes of making it easier for employers to hire and provide jobs for just the kinds of young people who have now occupied the square. But the government’s proposals also made it easier to fire.

To say that the plan backfired is an understatement. The answer from the younger generation trying to elbow its way into the work force was simple: We don’t want what you are offering; we want what our parents have, and then some.

All through March students and unions took to the streets to demonstrate. The protests spread to the provinces. The government quickly backed down, gutting its own plan.

“Our youth feel neglected by society,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls mused carefully in an interview with the newspaper Libération. “Nuit Debout is expressing this, in its own way.”

The concessions were quick in coming. Fearful of an unbudging 25 percent youth unemployment and a permanent mobilization in the streets, the government two weeks ago called in student union leaders and agreed to spend upward of 400 million euros (about $450 million) in subsidies, taxes and allowances aimed at helping young people find work.

High school graduates looking for work will now get government help for four months. Temporary work contracts — the bane of new entrants to the job market, since they represent most hires — will be taxed, to encourage more employers to hire people permanently. (The effect so far has been the opposite: Employer associations are infuriated.)

Dissatisfaction with the government, a hit film with a French super-boss as its target that was inspired by the American documentary maker Michael Moore, and the capital’s floating cast of permanent protest organizers helped congeal the new movement.

Nuit Debout’s organizers say they are not organizers, and the man anointed its “master thinker” in the French news media — Frédéric Lordon, a left-leaning economist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research — scoffs at the idea.

“It would be claiming a position of authority, and that’s ridiculous,” he said in an interview. “They don’t need a ‘master thinker.’ They are producing ideas in every direction. They don’t have a leader or a spokesman.” Nuit Debout, he added, was practicing “horizontal democracy.”

Among the rank and file, that sentiment is shared. Andrea, 27, who was working in the “Logistics” tent at the Place de la République, refused to give her last name — in the style of Nuit Debout’s organizers — because she said she did not want to be singled out as a leader.

But she described the evolution of the movement. “After one of the demonstrations, we said, ‘Let’s not go home,’ ” she explained.

Starting as a reaction against the labor-code overhaul, the protest organizers pondered the question: “How can we make them scared?” said Andrea, who said she was also on Nuit Debout’s “legal team.”

Not everyone is pleased, of course.

A luminary of the right-wing opposition, Brice Hortefeux, is furious that Paris’s mayor allows the continuing mass protest when France is still under a state of emergency after the terrorist attacks in November. “Night, standing up, government, standing down!” he fumed.

The right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro commented that “it’s the calix of humiliation that the prime minister must drink, right down to the dregs.” Brussels is already critical of France for failing to stem its public finances; the government ignored Brussels.

The government’s grasp, indeed, appears to be slipping. A headline in Le Figaro on Thursday read: “Government paralyzed in the face of Nuit Debout.”

Its economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, a former banker despised by France’s left for being too pro-capitalist, announced he was forming his own political movement, as his colleagues in the government grumbled about him anonymously in the press.

President François Hollande, facing near-certain defeat in elections next year, told television interviewers that “things are getting better,” which only provoked derision in the news media and on the streets.

The president’s soothing words were not enough to clear the Place de la République, nor has a sometimes heavy police presence hovering in the background.

For now, the movement’s daily twists and turns are chronicled anxiously on the left and the right as if it were a pop star: “Nuit Debout Thinks About Its Future,” was the front-page headline in Libération last weekend.

That followed headlines the movement made when it expelled to jeers and spittle the right-leaning philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, or appeared to have too many bearded leftist teachers and not enough workers, or was not appealing enough to people in the beleaguered suburbs.

While they try to make up their minds or decide their next moves, the participants seem to be having too good a time to leave, just yet.

“It’s an agreeable movement. It shows we’re still living in a democracy,” said Emmanuel Colas, 22, a computer software expert, watching the action recently on the side. “It’s what makes me love France. There are loads of people here. It’s not going to change things radically. But all these people are showing they love liberty.”

On a rare temperate evening the appeal seemed obvious. “They are attempting another way of doing politics,” said Florent Chappel, an engineer at the Housing Ministry. “It’s stimulating; it’s a taking-hold of conscience. A sort of vitality, a will to re-enchant the world.”