PARIS — The April 6 protest had already been going on for half an hour when I met Rémy Buisine. The 32-year-old video journalist for the French online outlet Brut had given me his live location, but he wasn’t yet wearing his neon yellow press bracelet, and given his attire (a light navy puffer jacket and blue jeans), he blended seamlessly into the crowd, which ranged from 57,000 to 400,000 people, depending on whether you believe the police or union organizers. In fact, Buisine found me: he shouted my name with a smile on his face, before returning to work and ordering a colleague to go shoot at the end of the march.
Buisine has become, for millions of people around the world, he Pay attention to the recent French protests. The demonstrations were originally around the pension reforms proposed by President Emmanuel Macron in January (the main sticking point was the possible increase in the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64) and the first marches were largely made up of middle-aged people loyal to the unions. However, on March 16, when the government forced approval of the reform project without a vote, more than 6,000 people showed up, without formal planning, in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. That crowd, mostly under 30 years old, was outraged by what they considered the government’s undemocratic actions.
Almost every night for the next two weeks, French people gathered in the streets in what the media called “spontaneous” or “wild” protests. “I saw a lot of young people show up,” Buisine said, “and many, still, who had never set foot in a protest.”
Buisine’s live broadcasts from the tear gas-hit protest fronts have lasted up to eight hours, with 70,000 people tuning in. Brut TikTok at the height of a stream. Over the past month, the outlet’s TikTok has gained a million followers (it now has 4.2 million) thanks in large part to its streams. (Buisine also broadcasts on Facebook and the Brut app.) And his reach is international: Fans constantly ask him to speak English, but Buisine doesn’t know how to say much beyond that he’s streaming “live in Paris.”
As we walked to the front of the day’s demonstration, Buisine used one of his two phones (one business and one personal) to take photos of protesters’ signs for the Brut Instagram Account. In the half hour we were together, six fans or colleagues came to greet us, including a volunteer doctor who asked Buisine when his broadcast would begin. “Soon, soon,” Buisine said, pausing only momentarily.
