Shots in the Paris night. There is a point on the endless adventure where events unfold unexpectedly. Actions reap their own consequences, planning counts for little, moments uncertain between fantasy and reality lose all their seperations. When the movement against the state plan to enslave young unemployed to petty bosses at a cut price rate, fate was already on our minds. In the next months there was some of the most intense looting and rioting in France in the recent history. With a government capitulation the establkishment sought to refind the consensuas and easy social management. The confrontations had demonstrated that there was a new force to be reckoned with: a youth disabused of the illusions of career, who saw their only place in the dominant order was to be miserable- but life was for the living. Of course the effort to devclare a return to normality in the aftermath was just a deception of governmental art, for who could believe that those who repossessed the city in a carnival of broken glass and fire coulld care less for the society which had built toytown. Florence and Audrey were two two such revoltes. Children of the suburbs - wretched grey blocks of the poverty of economy, boredom and despair - they had made their deciosion announced themselves against this world. Working with radical groups such as SCALP (an autonomist network) and the CNT ( anarchist militants) they fought hard during those months of March and April 1994 when the movements offensive was at a peak. From the cs gas filled streets of Paris to the university of Nanterre on the fringe of the Peripherique they tended the flowers of the revolution. As the crisis passed (apparently) and the drift back to surface obedience and cynical despair gathered pace, Florence and Audrey wanted to go on. Witnessing the savagery that the state held waiting as a response to its enenmies, seeing the blood on the batons of the CRS and knowing that the rulers cannot give up their realm with resort to war, they began to argue for a radical violence. Over the next months they left the halls of organised activists and moved in the world of the squatted houses of revolutionary hedonism where talk turns often to the armed bandits who have repudiated the morality of humanism and the social consensus. They read of the Red Brigades, Action Directe and also the story of Jacques Mesrine. Hated by the police and government, Mesrine was an armed robber with conviction, a prison rebel,a philosopher of desire who believed that the only way to be free, was not to be a slave...... So it was that one night in October they made their way across Paris to Nation in the east where the police depot was the target of their interest. Gassing several cops they stole some weaopns and then made their escape. Quickly they hijacked a taxi and headed further east towards the forest at Vincennes. The taxi driver panicking, crashed the car into a police patrol to alert them that something was at foot. In the ensuing shoot-out, three policemen, the taxi-driver and Audrey were all killed. Florence was arrested at the scene. As the news emerged, the pornographers who practice journalism turned all eyes on the polidce photo of Florence, defiant and silent in the face of their questions. After fouty eight hours she finally told the her name, Then she said, "it's destiny". Of course the media needed other falsifdications to render the story suitable for sensatiuonalisation. There was no mention connection allowed between the gesture fo that october night and their hate for this dying society and their lust for one made anew. Repackaged in the bizarre costume of the media and its ideological supermarket, they became Natural Born Killers!!! on the evidence of a programme for the film found in their squatted house in a run down part of Nanterre. It was painful to see them stripped of their dignity. Meanwhile the subversive community in Paris held its breath, knowing that the arrest of Florence would not be sufficent to satisfy the appetites of the flics , reeling from the death of three of their number. Paranoia torched the thermometers, the heat was on. And in the city it's hard to live if you want to isolate yourself, which is the only safety paranoia can ever consider. The modern world splits us up into atoms, living alone or in small distant flats, caught between the divisions of gender, race and age, the individual the collective....... the radiacl community dissolved itself. People stopped visiting one another, ceased to speak openly about anything which could implicate them in the crime of even understanding what Florence and Audry had done but the secret is to tell all, All mentions of this affair were greeted wn attitude of we can't talk about it; sub judice...... One week, two weeks, three weeks and Florence is in jail, 19, her lover dead, and they want to make her pay, and fear forces even her friends to disavow her.In the months that followed no thought of a public display pf support for her was ever brought, no posters, no collections, no stickers. The anarchist press distanced themselves from their actions, the FA (anarchist federation) even going so far as to advise their regional sections to play down the link with radical libertarian politics and practice. Twomi was an algerian radical who had been around the fringe of the autonomist milieu and squats of the city, and close to the apocalyptic cult of the end whichmade him a specialist of radical aestheticism in his writings on Algeria. One of the guns found at the soot out of Vincennes had been bought by Tuomi who had been close to Florence and Audrey, although he was disliked by many. Arrested by the police, Twomi revealed lies as truth so as to help him save his own skin. Claiming that he did not buy the gun for them but for another, Philippe, he said that he was in fact working for the Algerian sate to entrap Islamic radicals and autonomists, providing a justification fopr repression. Philippe had been active within autonomy in the 1980s and had also already done five years for armed robbery ( convicted when he also was 19) and made the perfect target for a police framing and manipulation. On the basis of Twomi's information he was held for four months whilst the police attempted to fabricate evidence to link him with the shoot-out; the state wanted a conspiracy. Eventually, in the utter impossibility of him being involved he was freed. Meanwhile a map of the prison with the positions of the prison guards marked was found in Florence's cell, we smiled with reilef that she thinks still of escape and hope despite all the state's need for vengeance which circles around her.