«I laughed at a police officer — and they rushed at me». A conversation with a 16-year-old lycée student who went to a demonstration for the first time
I recorded this interview anonymously a week after the large demonstration by lycée students on October 8 at Place de la Bastille in Paris. The scene at the event was picturesque: crowds of young people climbed onto the huge pedestal of the monument, amid clouds of black smoke from burning trash bins and white (tear) gas, dozens of fully equipped riot police «cosmonauts» with transparent shields and batons at the ready, face to face with fragile girls and boys clutching cardboard signs with witty handwritten slogans, bright scarves and black masks worn by participants, shouts and songs rolling from one corner of the square to the other, the booming blasts of stun grenades and the crackle of firecrackers. A sense of a risky celebration. This is almost how the big media portrayed the «revolutionary» lycée mobilization. Saturday, October 17 added to it — once again in recent years — smashed shop windows and burned cars. Terror in the streets of Paris! Meanwhile, in the French press, not to mention the Russian-language one, there were — once again — very few pieces offering a view of the events from the inside, through the eyes of participants.
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