Once the panda released me from his embrace on rue Sainte-Catherine on a recent Saturday night, men at the leather bar across the way waved him over for their chance at a law-breaking hug. The panda is an anarchist, and in Quebec, everything we are doing right now – including hugging an anarchist panda in a crowded street – is illegal.

Our hug dans la rue put us on the wrong side of the law due to Bill 78, which prohibits any gathering of fifty people or more without prior police approval. After Bill 78 passed on May 18 this year, in open defiance Montreal residents have taken to the streets in the thousands – including my new panda friend.

He's an anarchist-pacifist, he told me after our chance meeting, but he calls himself Anarchopanda. You can find tributes from his fans on Facebook and a handful of videos of him on YouTube, hugging the riot cops dispatched to suppress the spontaneous marches that have surfaced every night since the bill's passage.

His passionate online following and his signature hugs on the streets have made him the most identifiable protest-meme to come out of Montreal's hundred-and-some-dozen-day long student strikes, which Bill 78 was created to put down.

Anarchopanda never meant to stir such adoration, like the tribute song that turned up a few days after we met:

https://soundcloud.com/gaetan-troutet/anarchopanda

His night job, as he described it to me, is to be at the front line at each demonstration, to diffuse police tension and the potential of violence. But he knows, he said, that the cameras and the notoriety – the eyes on him that they all constitute – are "one of the reasons why the panda hasn't been arrested yet."

"The panda." That's how he talks about himself. But underneath the strapped-on fur, he's Julien Villeneuve, a professor of philosophy at a post-secondary college. He's been anonymous until this week, when he revealed his identity in the course of filing a legal action in Montreal courts to protect the right to protest.

Villeneuve originally came out to support the student protestors before the passage of Bill 78 and before he became Anarchopanda. He first went as part of a group of professors called La Chaîne de Solidarité Profs-Étudiants. "We wore vests that identified us as professors and when the police charged, we'd go on the front line with the students, between them and riot cops." But as the protests wore on, and the anti-protest law was passed, the group began to dissolve.

"A lot of professors were injured, and some couldn't take it psychologically night after night," he said. "At the end, there wasn't a whole lot of people left and it was starting to look pretty silly. So I decided to sort of do it on my own, and to do it this time as the panda, and see what happened. My primary role is still to be there with the students when they get aggressed by the police."

"Giving hugs to the students was not part of the original plan at all," Anarchopanda told me.

Unlike Occupy marches over the last nine months in the States, Montreal's street demonstrations – or, #manifencours, as you would find them reported on Twitter – gather, cluster, and set off with little obvious police confinement. If you want to find one, the Montreal police have taken on the odd public service of posting march locations to their own Twitter feed. (An Android app launched this week by Montreal developer Fabrice Veniard allows citizens to do the same.)

Aside from their reliable tweets, cop conduct on marches is unpredictable: A line of mounted police may hang back a few blocks, only to charge up rapidly to disperse the vulnerable tail end of a march. CUTV, the Concordia University-based crew who stick to the front of marches in order to livestream them, have captured footage of Montreal police beating protestors with batons and unloading canisters of pepper spray and tear gas at close range.

Everyone, after over a hundred days of this, could use a hug.

The march the author and her crew stumbled onto. Credit: Melissa Gira Grant

I joined my first manif within minutes of finding a parking spot for our hastily-rented car, somewhere along rue St-Hubert. I had never been to Montreal and had only been following the protests online, but we were determined to witness them, be part of them, whatever we could manage with twelve hours of planning.

Tommy, the trip's amateur scholar of revolutions, spotted what looked like a hundred people heading towards us about two or three blocks away. He may have heard them first, the clash and thud of the pots and pans they beat on their marches. The act of smashing kitchenware around with political intent, are called casseroles. Tommy bolted ahead to meet them, to snap photos, and the rest of us – Sarah, a labor reporter from Brooklyn and Jacob, a historian who has lived in Montreal and New York – were off to catch up.

We were quickly absorbed into the din. If Occupy's beat is defined by its throwback drum circles, the manifs are uprisings as scored by a populist industrial avant-garde:

https://soundcloud.com/melissagiragrant/27-may-2012-montreal-casserole

Out on casserole, we circled the city's student ghetto and open-air bars – with residents of all ages were raising frying pans and cupcake tins, banging along with us as we passed – and then we wandered back to our host's apartment. Spread out on the table was the day's issue of Le devoir, an independent French language paper published in Quebec. From page 1, Anarchopanda gazed up.

"We've got Anarchopanda," said Anna, one of our hosts, and the administrator of the blog Translating the printemps érable, where volunteers translate into English the best of the Francophone coverage of the student movements. The Anglophone press has been late to cover the protests, and when they have, make the students out to be disruptive and ungrateful. The students in Montreal's universities have been organizing for years to pushback on program cuts and fee increases, but the marches seen this May – 400,000 at their height – are unprecedented in North America.

Anarchopanda on the front page of Le Devoir. Credit: Tommy Moore

"You've got a narco-panda?" I asked, considering the photo in the paper. A panda, its belly stuffed with pills. Possibly a honey trap for cuddle-loving smugglers.

I was corrected.

"He's like a rock star," Anna said. "When he's out in action, everyone wants to high five him, hug him, offer him a drink. When you find him on a march, it's like meeting the queen."

Activist humor springs from the streets as fast as demos do these days. 2006, Belarus: to get around prohibitions on public gatherings, activists critical of the contested election of President Lukashenko used LiveJournal to organize ice-cream eating flash mobs. 2012, New York: when Occupy Wall Street protestors faced nightly eviction from the city's public park in Union Square, they invited the cops to face off in rap battles across the barricades. 2012, Montreal. I found myself reaching for Anarchopanda's paw across an outstandingly raucous march.

We heard the casserole coming from inside Anna's apartment, and so we bounded out again into the night, swiping our phones into off-network mode so as not to rack up hideous data fees. At first, we joined little kids marching, holding their moms' hands just a few paces in front of police cars, and winding east again, hundreds strong again. We took to the center of the city's gay village.

Around midnight on a summer Saturday night, the bars were stuffed with younger men in t-shirts and scarves and slightly older men in vests and jeans, and strings of pink lights hung from one side of the street to the other high above our heads. I darted over to get a quick photo of a go-go bar that seemed to speak deeply to the beautiful sexual politics of the moment, and then turned back to the march, more or less phone-free in the crashing and hollering.

My crew was nowhere in sight.

Anarchopanda on the move. Credit: Tommy Moore

But he was: towering black and white in the crowd, with a few men at his side, like handlers. Feeling like I was going to be alone, off-the-grid in revolutionary Canada for a long time, I slipped up next to him and, without thinking, put my hand on his. Standing next to the panda from the front page of the paper, crashing from the rush up north and over the border, barely slipping into the buzz of the march, it felt quiet.

All the attention Anarchopanda has garnered has protected him, and by extension, his role in holding the police at bay. "They could have arrested me at least three times so far, but they haven't. Once, there was a line of riot police charging a cluster of students, and the line stopped at me for a while. Then the police said, 'Run!' and I started moving as fast as I could, and that bought the students some time."

"Now many more people talk about the panda than who go to the demos and see what I really do," he said. Still, Anarchopanda tries not to spend too much time focused on the reactions to him. "There are discussions on Facebook between people saying, 'Stupid mascot! People are talking about the panda, and not the real issues.' Which is true. But I do what I can to thwart that. And there's other people that have been at the protests, and they will defend the panda and say, 'he's not there to promote himself, he's there to help with the police.' If the panda draws people to some awareness of the students' cause, that wouldn't have otherwise, that's nice. But I want people to be with the students for the right reason."

"On Facebook, I post as Anarchopanda, and I say things like, 'when I am without the costume, I am disguised as a human,' but I'm not a character. I do have to interact with people online to a certain degree, not to try to control the message, because I can't. And once I tried to answer all of the messages I got – particularly messages of support. Lots of times it's one-liners, but I've received some pretty intense testimonials of things that have happened to people, people saying, 'getting a hug from the panda at the right moment changed things.'"

This is what happens when what has been propelled into memedom becomes a moment again in real time. I didn't know where this march was going to take me, but the signposts of digital age street action – the Anons in their masks, the hashtag humor, and especially the mascot-cum-ambassador – were there to guide me, and get me home safe, too.

Because – of course – once I finally looked up from my little panda wonderland, my whole crew had returned. I took them back into the thick of the march, and introduced them to Anarchopanda by way of putting my arm around him to ask for a proper hug, and Tommy snapped the photo, and in the morning, as we woke to fully-charged phones again, Sarah called out from the other end of the apartment, "So you're on Anarchopanda's Facebook."

Memes move fast, it's true. While jokey, they mean that a movement, like the Quebec students, like Occupy, and many others across the globe that are as inspired by their success as their in-jokes, are serious, here to stay – and like the panda, they slow the pace just long enough for an outsider to latch on, get their bearings, and join in.