PARIS — A hundred masked demonstrators dismantled the CNews headquarters overnight and rebuilt it, stone by stone, on the Quai de la Tournelle facing the Seine, completing the relocation before sunrise and leaving a tidy pile of unused mortar on the original site.
The operation, which organizers described as «a change of scenery,» began at 2 a.m. when the group formed a human chain stretching from the building's lobby to a fleet of flatbed trailers parked along the boulevard. By 5 a.m. the facade had been loaded, driven across the river, and reassembled with the newsroom's main window angled directly at the water. Police made forty arrests during the morning, mostly of volunteers who had stayed behind to sweep the pavement.
Influencer Rayan PSN, who had spent the previous week posting tutorials on how to carry a load-bearing column without dropping it, was taken into custody at 6:15 a.m. after arriving at the new site with a spirit level and a clipboard. «He kept saying the building was off by two degrees,» a police spokesman said. «We had to stop him from adjusting the river.»
By midday, the relocated headquarters had drawn a crowd of several hundred, many of whom had brought folding chairs to watch the channel's staff wander the quays looking for their desks. A second group began measuring the Eiffel Tower for what organizers called «phase two,» though no one could agree on where it should go.