Paris, Nuit Debout. Olivier Ortelpa/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Earlier this month, police in Paris evacuated a vacant high school that had been occupied by homeless migrants for about two weeks. In a hopeful sign of solidarity, over 100 individuals, many of whom identify with nascent Nuit Debout movement, demonstrated against the evacuation.
Nuit Debout – literally ‘standing night’ – is a social movement taking over public squares in cities from Paris to Marseille to Lille, and it has even spread internationally to cities like Berlin and Barcelona. The movement was sparked by demonstrations against a proposed labour law reform in France, but it quickly broadened to encompass many concerns in contemporary European societies. Participants identify their struggles in terms of feminism, racial equality, antifascism, environmentalism, democracy, and more, and they seek to forge alliances between these ideologies in what they call a “confluence of struggles”.
