PARIS, FRENCH REPUBLIC, June 27 (HNS) -- Hundreds of arrests and injuries have occured in a confrontation betwen Paris police and protesters that still ongoing as of 5:30 today, with no end in sight. Vehicles were set aflame, as well as several buildings, with clouds of smoke casting a pall over the city.
Protestors shouted several revolutionary slogans, though eventually settled on a single phrase: "Magic is not real."
Earlier today the huge crowd of students and workers had congregated on the Rive Gauche. When the riot police blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd threw up barricades, which the police then attacked after negotiations floundered, leading to the current confrontation.
"The police wanted this fight," said one English-speaking protestor, repeating and translating an accusation made by several of the crowd and even some observers. "The police are participating, through agents provocateurs, in the riots, by burning cars and throwing molotov cocktails."
Even earlier today, in the morning, high school student unions spoke in support of the riots on June 26. They joined the college students, professors, and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that all criminal charges against students arrested on June 26 and before be dropped, that the police leave the universities, and that the authorities reopen the University of Paris at Nanterre and the University of the Sorbonne.
Negotiations broke down after students returned to their campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools. Observers reported that the students now had a near-revolutionary fervor, and the crowd re-convened, having grown in the process, on the Rive Gauche, shouting that magic was not real.
"The slogan that magic is not real is a metaphor for a desire to shake up of the old society and morality," said Dr. Terence Simonds of the Political Science Department at Penn State. "The old morality is based on Christian beliefs, which are rooted in a belief in miraculous, magical things, in their mind. Also, the De Gaulle government uses reports of the strange things outside the French Republic to justify their repressive policies, under the rubric of keeping France safe."
