Nuit Debout: France’s Nightly Movement for Social Justice (2016): Since the end of March, hundreds of people have been gathering every evening in the Place de la République in Paris. Dubbed Nuit Debout, it is a self-styled popular assembly” in which participants share views about politics and the state of the world.
Nuit Debout: France’s Nightly Movement for Social Justice
On a night in Paris, thousands of people sat cross-legged in the vast square at Place de la République, taking turns to pass round a microphone and denounce everything from the dominance of Google to tax evasion or inequality on housing estates.
As night descends, the speakers stand patiently in line and, turn by turn, take the microphone for their allotted five minutes. Before them, sitting on paving stones, the young audience responds with the occasional cheer or boo. Not that there is a huge amount to react to. The speeches are rambling and platitudinous.
A third wants to speak of human rights that burst in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The debating continued into the early hours of the morning, with soup and sandwiches on hand in the canteen tent and a protester in tents, who then bedded down to “occupy the square for the night before being asked to move on by police just before dawn. But the next morning they come back to set up their protest camp again.
Both speakers and listeners are mainly students – an impression confirmed by a tour of the stands. The Feminists are in a large huddle, a and I am asked not to take photographs Else, a screen shows a laborious film made by the woman who took the job. There is a group of antispeciesists , and it consists of a camera, a white sheet, and a laptop.
It is like wandering through a university campus during a sit-in. The same mixture of wide-eyed joy and po-faced earnestness. The same thrashing out of texts that no one will read. The same evanescent self-importance
Nuit Debout (Up All Night)
- A social movement that began on 31 March, arising out of protest against Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s labour market reforms.
- It has had nightly rallies at Paris’s Place de la République since then.
- It has spread to other French cities, as well as cities in Belgium, Germany and Spain
- The Activists organised through social media , are mainly left wing
- It has been compared to the Spanish Indignados citizens’ movement and the Occupy anti-globalisation movement.
France’s Nightly Movement for Social Justice
France has a long and rich history of social movements involving street protests and occupations of public sites that played and continue to play a fundamental role in popular political action. The dramatic events of May 1968 that involved strikes and demonstrations, as well as the occupation of universities and factories, are an important part of the social, cultural, and political history of France.
Set against a backdrop of austerity and neoliberal policies affecting many young people adversely, the Nuit Debout protest movement in France began in March 2016 when people gathered in public spaces to oppose the socialist government’s plan to introduce labour legislation. Like other post Nuitt, it was leaderless and non-hierarchical and relied on social media for the righteous anger and hope. The government’s plan to introduce neoliberalism.
That is how the Nuit Debout protest movement started in France. Student unions and trade unions had organised a demonstration for 31 March 2016 to oppose a bill recently proposed by the Socialist government led by Prime Minister Manuel Valls on employment law reform. The legislation commonly referred to as the El Khomri law after Myriam El Khomri, the Minister for Labour, would particularly affect young people within the labour market.
Nuit Debout sits within a wider youth-led movement triggered by austerity and experiences of precarity often expressed and communicated through social media. Nuit Debout can also be understood as part of global protest action precipitated by the 2008 global financial crisis in which young people played a key role.
Conclusion
In this article we discussed the Nuit Debout: France’s Nightly Movement for Social Justice (2016): Since the end of March, hundreds of people have been gathering every evening in the Place de la République in Paris. A third wants to speak of human rights that burst in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
