This Fearless Video Journalist Is Livestreaming The French Street Protests To Millions Worldwide

PARIS — The April 6 protest had already been moving for half an hour by the time I found Rémy Buisine. The 32-year-old video journalist at French online media outlet Brut had given me his live location, but he wasn’t wearing his neon-yellow press armband yet and, given his outfit (a light, navy puffer jacket and blue jeans), he blended right in with the crowd — which was anywhere from 57,000 to 400,000 people, depending on whether you believe the police or union organizers. Buisine found me, in fact: He yelled out my name with a smile on his face, before getting back to business, instructing a colleague to go shoot the back of the march.

As we walked to the front of the day’s demonstration, Buisine used one of his two phones (one business, one personal) to take pictures of protesters’ signs for the Brut Instagram account. In the half hour we’d been together, six fans or peers came to say hi, including a volunteer medic who asked Buisine when he’d start his broadcast. “Soon, soon,” Buisine said, stopping only momentarily.

Outside Montparnasse station, near the Brut offices, Buisine paused to pull hermetically sealed goggles and a gas mask out of his backpack. He put the goggles into his right outer jacket pocket, and looped his gas mask over his neck. He had tear gas decontaminant spray in another jacket pocket.

At 3:29 p.m., a few hundred feet down the boulevard, we heard a loud bang — source unknown. The protesters cheered and jeered back, yelling “ACAB” (though the crowd’s French accents made it sound like “ah-caaaaah-buh”). As we made our way to the front zone, a bunch of young people, dressed completely in black and masked up, lounged next to an exit of the Vavin metro station. A few feet ahead, next to Café de la Rotonde, gendarmerie — a military force — lined the width of the boulevard with their riot shields up.

At 3:37 p.m., the gendarmerie blasted an unmistakable warning shot. The crowd tensed up; as some protesters retreated, Buisine pushed his way forward. He had his phone out and was recording video, though not livestreaming yet. Two or three more warning shots rang out quickly. Black-clad figures — the youth from before — materialized at the frontline. One banged a metal barricade on the road as he moved up. Buisine and I locked eyes: It was time for me to go.

As agreed beforehand, I was to leave at the first sign of trouble. When Buisine films, he focuses on police action and is known to run toward it — and I did not have the protections afforded by equipment or a press card. I turned around as I pushed through the crowd; Buisine had put his bag down and was taking his helmet out.

Less than a minute later, the first tear gas canister was launched into the crowd. Buisine was already busy streaming.

“It’s the job of my dreams,” Buisine said, referring to being a journalist, in an interview at Brut’s Paris office the week before. Growing up in a village in France’s northeast, Buisine didn’t know anyone in journalism and didn’t test well at school, which precluded him from getting into a good university. So after graduating from a horticultural technical high school, he got a job managing soccer players’ social media. Still, he yearned to be a journalist, and to do that, he had to move to Paris.

Buisine arrived in the city in August 2013, after landing a job as a community manager for Parisian radio stations. It wasn’t journalism yet, but it was a step in the right direction.

In 2015, he embraced the then-new livestreaming app Periscope, using it to stream the protests against the El Khomri labor laws — which made it easier for companies to lay off workers — in his spare time. Buisine got his training on the ground, learning what people wanted to see based on their reactions to his livestreams, and how to go about reporting by asking the established journalists also covering the protests.

Although he still didn’t consider himself a journalist, his livestreams got traction and resulted in his being hired as a founding member of Brut in 2016. At the beginning, the French establishment had absolutely no idea what to make of Brut, as it existed solely on social media platforms. “Some politicians were chilly about coming on Brut,” Buisine says, “because they were scared of communicating on social media.” However, in 2020, Buisine led a two-and-a-half-hour livestreamed interview with Macron.

Buisine has gained a large fanbase, most of them young people who are Extremely Online like him. Part of his appeal is that he’s willing to really listen. Prominent protester Ritchy Thibault, 18, told BuzzFeed News that he admired Buisine because “he gives time to people on the street to talk for 10, 20 minutes, interviewing them at length as to why they’re protesting.”