Protest by Moonlight

Hello everyone,

So...it's been a while. Sorry about that. Ariel and I aren't too good about keeping up with this whole blogging thing, I guess. In fact, I know. And so do you. So I'm stating the obvious. But I'm also posting now, right? So, there you go. We're getting better. Hopefully.

Anyway, why I'm writing tonight: it's a little past midnight right now, and I just witnessed one of the stranger things I've seen since coming to Paris - a midnight protest rally.

A little background: Ariel and I live in the 5th arrondissement, the Latin Quarter, which is home to many of Paris' schools, including the College de France, Ecole Polytechnique (just across the street), and the Sorbonne. In fact, the road just in front of our apartment is Rue des Ecoles - School Road. Fun stuff. Now, the schools in France have been in a bit of turmoil for the past few months. Namely, the professors and many of their students are currently on strike in protest against changes coming down from the Sarkozy government concerning, among other things, academic funding and scholarly independence (honestly, I'm not well enough aware of what's going on to give you any really worthwhile information - and this coming from an academic and historian of France. Sad). As part of the strike, students (and I imagine some professors) have taken to marching down Rue des Ecoles on multiple occassions as part of their demonstrations, complete with banners, chants, and the obligatory dreadlocked dude with his djembe.

It's actually been quite a while since the last protest, though. That is, until tonight. At midnight. It seems like it was an unprepared march - like a bunch of people were at a meeting, got riled up, and decided a nice walk to the Sorbonne was what they needed. I have to say, it's kind of freaky to hear a mass of angry yelling and banging head toward you in the middle of the night. To make things even better, a bunch of the students started taking the barriers set up for the construction work around our apartment and tossing them around. They moved a few of them to block in a car - which seemed a little mean. Most surprising to me, though, was the fact that they literally set up a (small) barricade in the middle of the Rue des Ecoles. Check it out - it's just under the streetlamp in this very low quality photo I took with my phone camera:


As someone whose research concerns France's revolutions and public recall to those revolutions in contemporary politics and culture, this seemed like a pretty striking thing to do - I mean, just about every popular uprising in France since the Fronde has involved people barricading the streets. Did the students have this tradition in mind when they set up their tiny roadblock? Most likely not. They probably just saw these portable metal walls and thought using them to block traffic would make their protest more disruptive and therefore effective. Or, if one's feeling less generous, maybe it's just a stupid act of vandalism. Still, the overthinking nerd in me got chills watching it happen.

Ariel, meanwhile, slept like a baby through it all.