By Henry Fowler
PARIS: Rain begins to drizzle across London as an eager group of more than 50 trade unionists and students gather near Euston station. We are waiting for our very special bus: the Solidaritebus, organised by Strike Map, taking us to France to join the huge mobilisation called for November 5 across the French workers’ and students’ movement.
All aboard! We leave London and head towards the Channel crossing. The journey through the tunnel is straightforward, and we arrive in France on time. But while we travel, the French trade union movement is locked in a battle with the government through the courts over the timing and route of the November 5 demonstration and march. With the demonstration now expected to begin later in the afternoon, we are travelling deeper into France without knowing exactly how these legal wranglings will be resolved.
Our bus brings together a broad cross-section of the British labour movement: Unite members, Unison stewards, PCS and UCU national executive members, Daniel Kebede, NEU general secretary, alongside students from across the country. We have a flexible and straightforward plan. We want to join picket lines outside schools, a major feature of this latest mobilisation across France, beginning with school students, assemblies and demonstrations bringing workers together, meet with the Confederation of Labour (CGT) leadership ahead of the big national march in the afternoon.
We arrive at Gare du Nord in Paris at around 6am, tired and sleep-deprived. Before doing anything else, we stop to find somewhere to take our first group photograph in the darkness. With banners held aloft and Strike Map’s distinctive noisemakers proudly displaying the Solidaritébus logo, we manage to get some good pictures before heading around the corner to the first café open for business.
As we enter, our group takes over most of the café. Staff and local customers look on, clearly wondering what is going on. We settle in, drinking fresh coffee and enjoying the stereotypical warm croissants. While sitting there, we notice a few students pulling bins past the main station.
Several of our group, including a few fluent French speakers, go over to ask where they are heading. They explain that they are going to their school. The police have been removing the bin barricades, so the students have been travelling around the city looking for replacements. They tell us to come along at around 8am to join their picket. A small delegation from our group decides to head over.
Paris is waking up. For those of us with the spirit of the 1926 General Strike as our reference point for the day, it is striking how normal everything initially appears. The station is busy, and the underground network seems to be operating almost as usual.
We had planned to join pickets and assemblies where groups of workers were converging south of the city, so we set off on a long walk together. Fifty trade unionists and students making their way through the streets of Paris.
After walking through a market, we find ourselves near the Bastille. We decide as a group to cross the road and stop for another photograph. The traffic lights turn green and we begin to cross. Suddenly, a line of police officers wearing riot helmets and carrying visible weapons blocks our way.
As I turn around, people are shouting that the police have encircled us. We realise that we have been kettled, forced back off the crossing and surrounded by police. It is only 9am, and we have already come face to face with the growing state repression being deployed by Macron’s failing government to contain the movement opposing it. I ask the police officers what is happening. Their response is forceful: stay where we are and do not move.
We are asked to provide identification, and several members of the group are checked. The officers then ask for the organiser or leader. I am taken to one side and asked for my ID. Several plain-clothes officers begin speaking with the uniformed officers watching over me, while I remain separated from the rest of the group.
They ask what we are doing in Paris. We explain that we are visiting trade unionists from the UK and that we have at least one official sit-down meeting planned with the General CGT at 10am.
We are informed that we must remain in groups of no more than 10 and that the area we are in is restricted. Our group, they claim, constitutes an illegal assembly. We are instructed to join the official demonstration at 1pm or 2pm at Place de la Republique and not to spend any more time in this part of the city.
Then I am arrested. My hands are tied behind my back with a cable tie, and I am bundled into a police car with its blue lights flashing. We speed through central Paris, narrowly avoiding several cars along the way. I am told that I need to explain our presence to more senior officers. I am taken to a police station and escorted through several floors, past benches and groups of officers, before eventually being brought into a small room. Two senior officers are sitting behind a desk.
They ask why we are in Paris. I explain that we are there to meet fellow trade unionists and have meetings arranged with the CGT. They ask why we were in that particular area of Paris. I answer honestly: we had arrived early, were walking around the city and intended to join demonstrations. They ask for the details of our CGT contact and telephone them. The contact confirms our account.
Several lawyers enter and leave the room, carrying large textbooks and searching for which laws, if any, we might have broken. The officers ask me for my personal details, which I provide. They continue speaking in French, but despite my requests, both officers refuse to provide a translator.
Eventually, the room seems to accept a rather inconvenient reality: we have not broken any laws. Despite the restrictions imposed overnight, part of the government’s desperate attempt to prevent assemblies of striking workers and demonstrators, there is no apparent legal basis for holding us. I am released from the police station without charge, and my details are not retained.
I immediately contact our WhatsApp group to find out what has happened while I have been away. The news is that another member of our group has also been arrested and several people have been fined, although not everyone.
We are now in a strange situation. Most of our group have been kettled, told not to gather in groups larger than 10 and instructed to stay away from certain areas of the city. A smaller group had avoided the kettle and continued with our original plan to visit pickets and strike assemblies south of the Bastille.
We also hear reports of further demonstrations, with students joining striking rail workers at Gare du Nord. A contingent of our group heads back towards the station in smaller groups. After a short wait, a large and vocal group of students takes over much of the area in front of the station. Riot police, alongside regular police officers, line the surrounding streets.
We spot small groups carrying CGT flags walking back towards the Republique area, so our contingent decides to head towards the main demonstration. We let the rest of the group know through WhatsApp that we are making our way to the main march in the city centre.
As we walk, police officers stop and search us, alongside other passers-by heading towards Place de la Republique. During a search of one of our comrades, a striking Camden Unison traffic warden, the poles for our banner are confiscated. The officers then demand that he unfurl the full fabric banner, which he does. These armed police officers then ask him: “Are there not demonstrations in England?” He replies that there are. Their response? “Why don’t you fuck off back there then?”
It is one of many examples of the hostility and repression being experienced not only by visiting trade unionists like ourselves, but also by ordinary Parisians. The scale of the police presence and the aggression directed towards demonstrators feels like a direct response to the previous mobilisations of October 17: a retaliation, if you like, against a movement that refuses to disappear.
As we approach the northern side of the square, police barricades with large glass doors are being assembled to block the exits. The only apparent route out is along the main route towards the Nation area, the official endpoint of the march.
Then I receive a message from our CGT comrades, who had helped secure our release earlier in the day. They tell me that Sophie Binet, general secretary of the CGT, would like to meet the delegation and personally welcome us. This means making our way to the head of the demonstration.
During the call, our CGT contact makes something very clear: we must tell the story of the extraordinary state repression directed against trade unionists that is taking place. It is important that people know what is happening.
Meeting the CGT leadership Place de la Republique is beginning to fill up. Every side of the square is lined with union trucks, enormous balloons and trade union flags, demonstrating the scale of the co-ordinated mobilisation that has been organised.
Around the central monument, a large group of students has gathered. Below them, the crowds continue to grow, with food and drink trucks providing refreshments to those taking part. Music is playing, speeches and loud cheers, smoke flares fill the sky.
Groups from our bus begin to find one another again. Some of us have not seen each other since the morning. We exchange stories, compare experiences of the police repression and discuss plans for the rest of the day before our journey home.
Fabienne Rouchy, a member of the CGT Confederal Directorate, messages me to arrange the promised photograph and meeting with Sophie Binet. We meet in the increasingly crowded square. Fabienne is joined by other comrades from the CGT’s Bank of France section. We talk, exchange photographs, stickers and posters, and discuss the growing movement across France and the wider struggle for political and economic change.
Led by Pascale from the CGT group, we make our way through the now enormous demonstration. The march has not really begun moving yet, but the atmosphere is already electric. It is vibrant, dynamic and overwhelmingly young. Music booms from the floats representing different organisations, while trade union flags and banners fill the square.
Eventually, we reach the front of the demonstration. There is a separate, heavily stewarded area, with security guards also present. Fabienne speaks to the guards, and we are allowed through. Sophie Binet, general secretary of the CGT, is there to meet us. She shakes our hands and asks about our day. She apologises for the arrests early that morning and explains that this is the kind of repression the movement is currently facing.
We talk about the growing movements of resistance and general strikes across Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Italy and Belgium. There is a clear sense that the struggles taking place in France are part of something much bigger: a wider European movement of workers and students challenging declining living standards, attacks on our services and the failure of the neoliberal consensus.
Sophie’s official photographer takes pictures of the delegation, with us holding aloft the Strike Map Solidaritebus poster. Videos are also recorded celebrating the success of the day’s mobilisation and the international solidarity demonstrated by our visit.
More than 1.6 million people are reported to have taken part in mobilisations across France that day. For the Solidaritébus, it has been an extraordinary day plus. We set out from London to show solidarity with French workers and students.
Instead, we found ourselves caught up in the very repression that the movement is fighting against. We experienced first-hand the hostility of the police, the attempts to restrict assembly and the determination of the French state to contain a growing movement. But we also witnessed something else: the strength of a mass movement, the determination of students and workers to organise, and the importance of international trade union solidarity.
Despite the arrests, intimidation and restrictions, the streets of Paris filled with workers, students and trade unionists. And at the front of that mobilisation, the CGT leadership took the time to welcome our delegation and recognise the solidarity we had brought from Britain.
Once we had all regrouped at our meeting point, we filled the bus and set off towards the crossing. At passport control, we were asked to disembark while the coach was searched. The authorities discovered our megaphones and quickly realised that we had been involved in the manifestations, the demonstrations taking place across France.
They began questioning members of our group who were still waiting in the queue. Our bus drivers were even told that they should never bring these people back to France. It was clear that the authorities were determined to disrupt our journey home. Passport control was deliberately delayed, and as a result, we missed our allocated crossing.
When we eventually reached the UK side and went through British passport control, several members of staff remarked on how unhappy the French authorities had been with our group, and how much we appeared to have riled them. We travelled back through the tunnel and eventually arrived home later than expected, carrying an experience far bigger than any of us had anticipated.
The future of this movement, led by students and increasingly drawing in organised labour across Europe, remains uncertain. But for everyone who travelled on the Solidaritebus, the experience offered a concrete glimpse of the importance international solidarity.
We had seen the power of workers and students coming together, standing up to state repression. Above all, we had seen the potential of united mobilisation in every school, college and workplace. Perhaps even the air of revolution? (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
