Every year, around February, I feel the urge to write about the student strike of 2012, then I give up, telling myself that I have not yet managed to capture its essence, to define precisely what I could say about it, and that I am perhaps not in a position to say something about it, that I don’t have the tools to conceptualize this event, this experience, and to objectify it.
But, ultimately, perhaps it is a vain objective to want to say precisely something about it, an impossible exercise because of the “overflow” that this moment represents.
In fact, the 2012 student strike clearly changed my life.
Thanks to her, I perceived and experienced the strength and beauty of collective political action, to what extent together we could do great things, build and carry a movement, a mobilization beyond all that we could have imagined at the start. I let myself be carried away by this strength of the collective, of commitment, of exchange and of solidarity. Like an intoxication which would have lasted six months and which would have pushed my body to get up every morning at dawn and to go to bed late at night. From each action, from each demonstration, and there were many of them, it was this sharing, these moments of mutual aid that I remembered. Even in the middle of the “battlefield”, what touched me was this gesture towards the other, this attention to others, this support. We were together carried by our hopes, our claims, and nothing could weaken our determination.
It was also in 2012 that I took a liking to the exercise of collective deliberation. Reluctant at first, I ended up liking those hours of assemblies, congresses, where collectively we tried to adopt positions despite our differences, where we debated, argued, sometimes harshly, of course, but isn’t that what democracy is all about? My thinking has evolved profoundly over these instances and I have learned a lot from others and about myself. It was also there that I was confronted, for the first time, with the question of feminism, a commitment that I continued to support thereafter.
Obviously, all was not rosy. Police violence, fatigue, contempt for the government, injunctions and our internal differences could be harsh. But the strength of the movement, of our collective, made it possible to go beyond and continue, despite everything. And then, a lot of comrades in the fight became friends, close people, and that helped a lot.
For many of us, this strike has marked our future choices, it has built us, shaped us, and it will continue to do so. Our political implications, our associative commitments, our professional choices, our personal ties are marked by 2012.
And beyond that, she has built this unbreakable bond between us. Wherever we are today, whether we are friends, simple acquaintances or strangers, we have this sharing in common.