It is difficult to qualify “Autonomes ”. These activists who seem to want revolution in society, are against a certain legality and do not belong to any party. Here are some testimonies of activists, from the late 70s to the 2000s.
No Border activists, fighting for the rights of the undocumented and against migration policy, demonstrated in the streets of Strasbourg. Targeting the banks, the police station, the courthouse and the properties of the Accor group, which they accuse of being involved in the processes of detention and expulsion of immigrants, the activists have tagged the walls with anti-capitalist slogans. The protest went south. The CRS tried to repel a few hundred anarchists with tear gas. The confrontation with the police resulted in about twenty arrests.
On the night of March 16, 2006, following the demonstration of students against the First Employment Contract, clashes occurred between thugs and CRS in the Place de la Sorbonne. Small groups, very mobile, with anarchist flags and troskists according to a witness, attack the police, ransack the shops of the square and burn cars. Demonstrators shout "down with the state, cops and bosses". The journalist points out that the incidents involve a few thugs from the suburbs, but mostly far left activists and some people from far right mobilities. The report alternates factual images with interviews with two local residents and Pierre MURE, Director of Public Order and Traffic at the Prefecture of Police of Paris.
To identify the ideology and modes of action of the autonomous, the journalist interviews two activists. The autonomous movement is not determined by violence, explains the former. The offensive actions chosen tend to reappropriate a social space outside the consensual, legislative or political framework, using means other than traditional petitions or demonstrations, which it considers ineffective. The autonomous militate in various fieldss and carry out actions, such as occupying empty houses, operating pirate radios, practicing absenteeism, refusing price increases. as is done in Italy. For the second activist, the aim of the struggle is the advent of the revolution, but it must be started and experienced today, to avoid any drift in its practices, and to define the project of society of tomorrow. He concluded by denouncing the Red Brigades' operating methods, the assassination remains in his eyes a bourgeois shéma of violence.
According to Jean-Pierre POCHON, former Commissioner of General Intelligence, the autonomous movement, quite close to anarchism, is characterized by individual and violent actions that originally attacked the symbols of repression, like the police and detention centres for foreigners or detention centres for young people, but which today directly target the state apparatus.
Paul, an activist of the Libertarian Communist Organization explains what are so-called autonomous practices. Autonomy is defined by precise but varied practices, ranging from shoplifting to armed struggle. In this panel of possibilities, concrete actions are often limited to occupations of factories by workers, squats, the creation of free media. The common feature of the autonomous is their struggle against the state and its institutions, but no one can claim to represent autonomy. He believes that the left parties, the trade unions and the far left have corrupted the revolt, born of May 1968.
According to Sébastien SCHIFRES, author of a memoir on the autonomous movement in France from 1976 to 1984, the practices of the autonomous today have nothing more to do with the actions of the small groups of the 1970s. At present, no militant would commit robberies. Apart from the demonstrations, the autonomous remain present. Involved in the squat movement, apart from associations of poorly housed, Meriadeg gives his version: he rejects the terminology of terrorism. He went into resistance and aspired to a better world, a life chosen and not suffered.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of Berlin to protest against German reunification. The protest brings together autonomous, anarchists, extreme left activists and people from immigration. For them, the reunified Germany of Helmut Kohl represents a real nationalist danger and the East Germans risk being harmed in the process of integration in the Federal Republic of Germany. Clashes with the riot police resulted in arrests and injuries.