France’s #Nuit Debout Social Movement: Young People Rising up and Moral Emotions

Abstract

Set against a backdrop of austerity and neoliberal policies affecting many young people adversely, the Nuit Debout protest movement in France began in March 2016 when people gathered in public spaces to oppose the Socialist government’s plan to introduce neoliberal labour legislation. Like other post-2008 movements, Nuit Debout was leaderless, non-hierarchical, and relied on social media for political communication and to mobilise participants. The Nuit Debout was also a movement inspired by powerful moral-political emotions such as righteous anger and hope. In this article, the authors address two questions. First, what features of Nuit Debout distinguished it from earlier social movements in France? Second, what role did moral emotions play in mobilising people to act as they did? Drawing on interviews with young protestors and their own testimonies, we argue that Nuit Debout was a distinctive form of protest for France. One distinguishing feature was the way young people—the “precarious generation”—were motivated by a strong sense of situated injustice, much of which related to what they saw as the unfairness of austerity policies, being deprived of a decent future and the feeling they had been betrayed by governments.

Emotion Work in Tabligh Jama’at Texts

“…While each of these factors are important for a movement's ability to engage in activism, in the past few decades, social movement scholars have researched the emotional dynamics of mobilisation (for a review of this literature, see Van-Ness and Summers-Effler 2019), exploring emotions that lead to participation (Pickard and Bessant 2018;Hu and Wu 2021;Weiss 2021;Asún et al 2022;Nikolayenko 2022;Petrini and Wettergren 2022), emotions that sustain commitment (Feigenbaum et al 2013;Ransan-Cooper et al 2018;Pirkkalainen 2021), and emotions that hinder mobilisation (Summers-Effler 2010; Østbø 2017). These studies support Jasper (1998, p. 407), who observed, early on, that emotions play a role in individuals being drawn to a particular movement, and in their subsequent decision to remain in the movement and to participate in its activities.…”

Social movements as complex adaptive systems: The antecedents and consequences of movement participation in the age of social media

“…This conceptual framework is shown in Figure 1 below. Our Collective identity, group identity, identity Chan, 2017a;Chan, 2017b;Cowell-Meyers, 2014;Crowley, 2008;Fominaya, 2016;Fuist, 2014;Huq, 2020;Hyde, 2018;Lomicky & Hogg, 2010;Marquez, 2001;Stockemer, 2012;Surowiec, 2018;Taylor, 2000;Terriquez, 2015 Crowley, 2008;Franceschet, 2004;Hasso, 2001;Huang, 2017;McVeigh et al, 2003;Pickard & Bessant, 2018;Stockemer, 2012;Surowiec, 2018 framework illustrates a dynamic equilibrium where social identity, political efficacy, and structural embeddedness are the antecedents of social movement participation. Social media use moderates the relationship between each of the antecedents and social movement participation.…”

La seguridad y el estado democrático liberal. Criminalizando la política de los jóvenes

“…For Hocking (2003: 371), since 2001, such developments facilitated 'the preemptive control of political conflict and dissent, which may or may not protect individual citizens, but which certainly protects the state itself'. In this context, we have witnessed increases in the criminalization of street-based protests or public assembly in countries like the UK France, Canada and USA (International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations INCLO 2013; Pickard and Bessant 2018).…”

“…In these campaigns young people figured strongly. Added to this, we saw significant student-led campaigns opposing the neo-liberal 'reform' of universities across the globe (Pickard andBessant 2017, Grasso andBessant 2018).…”