Nuit Debout protest movement growing in size but losing intellectual steam in bid to create a fairer world

Wednesday is the 51st of March. According to a large crowd which assembles each night in the Place de la République in Paris, time froze on the day the demonstrations began. The month of March cannot end until a “new world” begins.

The Nuit Debout – “arise at night” – movement describes itself as a gathering of ordinary citizens who want to create a fairer world. They want, they say, a “genuine democracy” which is not dominated by big money and corrupt politicians. They say they have “no leaders, no demands, no pre-fixed ideas”.

There are poetry readings and concerts and pop-up food stalls, but mostly there are interminable “general meetings”. Anyone can talk for five minutes, so long as they are prepared to wait their turn. The crowd, up to 3,000 people some nights, votes by cheers or jeers or elaborate arm signals.

In the past few days, another, uglier face of Nuit Debout – some suggest the real face – has appeared. There have been violent, minority breakaway marches which have smashed bank windows, burnt cars and fought running battles with the police.

A couple of days ago, the right-wing French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut went along to see what all the fuss was about. He was there for about an hour before he was recognised from his frequent TV appearances. A small band of nuitdeboutistes were said to have screamed and spat at him. He and his wife were bundled off the square by the Nuit Debout security team “for their own safety”.

Mr Finkielkraut, 66, a lefty in his youth, was a minor player in the May 1968 Paris student uprising to which Nuit Debout has been compared. For many years now, he has been a spokesman for the “identity” politics of the right. Like the nuitdeboutistes, he detests the modern, liberal, globalised world, but for other reasons.

In an article in the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro, Mr Finkielkraut said that his experience had revealed the truth about the strange, nightly gatherings in the Place de la République (and smaller spin-offs in other French cities).

“Nuit Debout is a private club,” he wrote. “In this pretence at a citizen’s forum, they celebrate otherness but repress all other viewpoints. ‘The same’ debates feverishly with ‘the same’. Those who claim to be revitalising democracy… are reinventing totalitarianism.”

Mr Finkielkraut has a point. There is an element of charlatanry in Nuit Debout. The movement is not so leaderless as it claims. The core nuitdeboutistes come from the various tribes of the French extreme gauche – anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-trade, pro-migrant and pro-homeless, anti-consumption, anti-advertising, anti-America and anti-European Union.

The movement was started by a group called Convergence des luttes (convergence of the struggles), which seeks to unite the many mutually-detesting splinters of the French anarchist, ecological and anti-capitalist left.

It has two main gurus (don’t say leaders). The first is François Ruffin, 40, a journalist and filmmaker, who released this spring a funny and effective anti-capitalist documentary, Merci Patron, which has been packing cinemas across France. The second is Frédéric Lordon, 54, an economist, little known outside France but one of the few intellectuals who has a genuine following among French leftist youth.

The spark for the Nuit Debout movement was, Mr Lordon says, the attempts by President François Hollande’s reformist (ie “capitalist sell-out”) centre-left government to reform the rigid rules on hiring and firing in France. The labour law reform (now much watered down) was, Mr Lordon says, “that little something or other… which accelerated what had already been blowing in the wind for a long time”.

If you spend a night chez les Nuitdeboutistes, it is immediately clear that leftist views prevail. Anyone who deviates during a “general meeting” is booed and jeered or given the “crossed arms” signal which means “we profoundly disagree”.

Mr Finkielkraut is nearly correct when he says that Nuit Debout is a “revolutionary love-in bubble in the centre of a completely indifferent city”. He is right when he says that parts of the mainstream French media have over-sold the movement as a romantic, broad-based, open-minded citizens’ revolt against the corruption and power of the few.

And yet and yet.

The movement is still growing – growing slowly, but growing. It surfs on the same wave of broad anger that sustains Corbynism in Britain, the Sanders surge in the United States and the Podemos movement in Spain. If you speak to the fringe deboutistes – those who come out curiosity rather than commitment – they complain about flailing governments, arrogant banks, austerity, offshore accounts, unemployment, low wages for the many and astronomical pay for the few.

They have no answers to any of these things other than a vague feeling that that “people” should not put up with them any longer.

Where the movement is going is anyone’s guess. The centre-left government has been tactically indulgent, fearing that repression might ignite a 1968-type explosion amongst French youngsters (which seems unlikely). The centre-right and far right opposition are theatrically angry with the government for being so indulgent.

The Nuit Debout movement seems to be growing in size but losing intellectual steam. There are limits to any movement which claims to have no leaders and no demands.

At recent general meetings, there have been calls for a grève general (general strike). More realistically, some nuitdeboutistses wear stickers declaring a rêve genarale (general dream).

Nuit Debout should not be lightly dismissed. It is a symptom of a diffuse French (and not just French) social anger and distress. While it remains dominated by the sect-like, intolerant, hard left, it will remain part of the problem rather than part of the solution.