Gendarme, or local Paris officer equipped in riot gear, listens to a student protester. I could not hear what she was saying. At one point, a few students were trying to convince me that the cops, who they correctly noted represented the capitalist power structure, hated them. And I said, well, look at their faces. It seems to me that they kind of like you. I also explained that by this point, most places in the United States protesters would have been in handcuffs and/or getting clobbered by now -- that the cops in the States rarely followed a policy of non-escalation (um, to the contrary, and it's really stupid to see). The city's strategy here was to keep things extremely cool, and cops used their power in numbers, and basically stood around and took in the scene. And the traffic circle was closed long enough to screw up the rush hour and for TV crews to arrive and get some footage. 
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