Thousands of persons gather in the Place de la République in Paris, and in all of France, since the 31st of March. Assemblies are formed where people discuss and exchange. Each appropriates speech and public space.
Neither heard nor represented, people from every horizon re-take possession of reflection on the future of our world. Politics is not an affair of professionals, it belongs to everyone. The human being must be at the heart of the concerns of those who govern us. Particular interests have taken priority over general interests.
Each day, we are thousands occupying the public space in the Republic. Come and join us, and decide together our common future.
The Nuit Debout movement in france is a moment of excess, a composite of such monents played out everyday in occupations, assemblies, protests, mutual aid. In Paris, the daily organising and meeting around a multiplicity of themes (labour law, refugees, feminism, the economy, prisons, police violence, solidarity with workers protests/strikes), commissions set up to respond to the needs of occupiers (food, shelter, infirmary, etc.), the creation of a “popular university”, radio and television, and the contagion and diffusion of the movement through Paris’ neighbourhoods beyond the Place de la Republique and beyond Paris, is testimony to convergences of protest, as well as creation; the excess that creates new desires, identities, subjectivities formed in encounters freed of divided labour and hierarchical legal and social status.
The critics already bark at the movement (anarchists included), ready to pounce on a corpse declared to fail before it begins, because too reformist, too middle class, too disorganised, too “democratic”, a ready made denigration to be proclaimed of any movement not led by the offended and ultimately irrelevant vanguard.
Nuit Debout lives in all of its plurality, animated by all of those who dare to stand before violent indifference, who dare to dream and live another world. Tensions exist within it – and how could it be otherwise, with so many – political tensions, which only in struggle will they be worked through, or serve to divide, but with lucidity and understanding. If revolution is not a single event, and it cannot be, then perhaps it is what is at work here.
What no one at this moment can predict is where the movment will go. Voices however begin to make themselves heard as to where it should go: the need to move beyond the occupation of squares, the necessity of reaching out to the world of labour, the countryside, poor, peripheral city neighbourhoods, calls for an indefinite general strike. The desire for convergence thus persists, and as long as it does so, it may be powerful enough to both continue to push the movement forward while avoiding the trials of sectarianism.
We share below, in video, a series of interventions at the general assembly of Paris’s Nuit Debout of the 40th of March, a resonant array of voices of indignation and political imagination (sadly, however, without translation from the french) …
Nuit Debout: Creation unleashed
Thousands of persons gather in the Place de la République in Paris, and in all of France, since the 31st of March. Assemblies are formed where people discuss and exchange. Each appropriates speech and public space.
Neither heard nor represented, people from every horizon re-take possession of reflection on the future of our world. Politics is not an affair of professionals, it belongs to everyone. The human being must be at the heart of the concerns of those who govern us. Particular interests have taken priority over general interests.
Each day, we are thousands occupying the public space in the Republic. Come and join us, and decide together our common future.
A Nuit Debout Manifesto
The Nuit Debout movement in france is a moment of excess, a composite of such monents played out everyday in occupations, assemblies, protests, mutual aid. In Paris, the daily organising and meeting around a multiplicity of themes (labour law, refugees, feminism, the economy, prisons, police violence, solidarity with workers protests/strikes), commissions set up to respond to the needs of occupiers (food, shelter, infirmary, etc.), the creation of a “popular university”, radio and television, and the contagion and diffusion of the movement through Paris’ neighbourhoods beyond the Place de la Republique and beyond Paris, is testimony to convergences of protest, as well as creation; the excess that creates new desires, identities, subjectivities formed in encounters freed of divided labour and hierarchical legal and social status.
The critics already bark at the movement (anarchists included), ready to pounce on a corpse declared to fail before it begins, because too reformist, too middle class, too disorganised, too “democratic”, a ready made denigration to be proclaimed of any movement not led by the offended and ultimately irrelevant vanguard.
Nuit Debout lives in all of its plurality, animated by all of those who dare to stand before violent indifference, who dare to dream and live another world. Tensions exist within it – and how could it be otherwise, with so many – political tensions, which only in struggle will they be worked through, or serve to divide, but with lucidity and understanding. If revolution is not a single event, and it cannot be, then perhaps it is what is at work here.
What no one at this moment can predict is where the movment will go. Voices however begin to make themselves heard as to where it should go: the need to move beyond the occupation of squares, the necessity of reaching out to the world of labour, the countryside, poor, peripheral city neighbourhoods, calls for an indefinite general strike. The desire for convergence thus persists, and as long as it does so, it may be powerful enough to both continue to push the movement forward while avoiding the trials of sectarianism.
We share below, in video, a series of interventions at the general assembly of Paris’s Nuit Debout of the 40th of March, a resonant array of voices of indignation and political imagination (sadly, however, without translation from the french) …
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To follow events, among the best online sources remain Convergences des luttes, along with Nuit Debout Facebook and Twitter.