PARIS – The April 6 protests had already been in motion for half an hour when I found Rémy Boisin. The 32-year-old video journalist at French online media outlet Brut gave me his live location, but he wasn’t wearing his neon-yellow press badge yet, given his attire (a light navy blue puffer jacket and blue jeans). He blended right in with the crowd — which ranged from 57,000 to 400,000 people, depending on whether you believe the police or the union organizers. In fact, Posen found me: he shouted my name with a smile on his face, before returning to work, ordering a colleague to shoot at the back of the march.
Buisine has become, for millions of people around the world, the In light of the recent French protests. The demonstrations were originally about pension reforms proposed by President Emmanuel Macron in January – the main sticking point was a potential increase in the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 – and the first marches were largely made up of loyal middle-aged people. For unions. . However, on March 16, when the government passed the reform bill without a vote, more than 6,000 people showed up, without formal planning, on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. This crowd, most of whom were under the age of 30, were angry at what they saw as the government’s anti-democratic actions.
Almost every night, for the next two weeks, French people gathered in the streets in what the media called “spontaneous” or “unruly” protests. “I saw a lot of young people showing up, many of whom, though, had never set foot in a protest before,” Booysen said.
Buisine’s live broadcast from the front lines of the tear-gassed demonstrations continued for up to eight hours, with 70,000 people tuning in. Brut Tik Tok On high current. Over the past month, the outlet’s TikTok has gained 1 million followers — it now has 4.2 million — thanks in large part to its streams. (Buisine also broadcasts on Facebook And the Brut app.) His reach is also global: fans are constantly asking him to speak English, but Buisine doesn’t know how to say more than that: he broadcasts “live in Paris.”
As we walked to the front of today’s protest, Booysen used one of his two phones (one work and one personal) to take photos of the signs protesters had held up for the demonstration. Brut’s Instagram account. During the half hour we spent together, six fans or colleagues came to say hello, including a volunteer doctor who asked Buisine when he would start his broadcast. “Soon, soon,” said Bozen, pausing only momentarily.