The Morning After: Nuit Debout - Debates, Practice and Theory

Abstract

This paper analyses the French protest movement Nuit Debout that started on March 31, 2016 at the Place de la Republique in Paris. The protest is approached from the perspective of the debate that took place in French media on how to define of the enemy, goals, preferred strategy and organizational model, then, from the angle of the protest practice itself, and finally, that of the sociology of Luc Boltanski. The article focuses on two issues that got the most attention from the protesters and the public - convergence of struggles and prefigurative politics. Both are discussed from the vantage point of Boltanski's study of contemporary capitalism in order to provide propositions for further development of the ideas that Nuit Debout tried to put into practice. The aim is to highlight the importance of everyday practices and experiences of injustice for today's critique of capitalism and the convergence of struggles, as well as to assess the role that experimenting with participatory democracy and horizontality, present in the latest social movements as well as in Nuit De bout, plays in processes of confluence of those experiences and 'ordinary' critiques and their transformation into program, strategy and action.