31 October: 70,000 police officers face the cost of living and the lycée students

According to franceinfo, numerous demonstrations and gatherings are taking place across France on 31 October for "Acte III" of the movement against the cost of living and for better study conditions for lycée and university students. In Bordeaux, Avignon or Guéret, the marches are described as "globally" calm in the early afternoon. The same article specifies that 70,000 police officers and gendarmes have been mobilised. The dispatch says nothing, at this stage, about the number of protesters, the precise organisers or any incidents elsewhere. We will not make it up.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us first note the adverb. "Globally": it is the kind of word that prepares the ground for the exception. When the marches pass off without incident, it is noted as a surprise; when a shop window smashes, it makes the front page. The framing of the day is already in place: public order first, demands afterwards. Yet these demands are tragically ordinary: to eat, to find housing, to heat one's home, to study without trembling about the end of the month.

Seventy thousand uniforms for people who are asking for the means to live. The figure says something about the state's relationship with the street. Classical Marxists saw in the police, the budget and tax law institutions shaped by property relations and tasked, in the last instance, with protecting them. Later writers nuance this: the state enjoys relative autonomy, and it is also a terrain of struggle. Fair enough. But autonomy is measured by what it deploys: a colossal apparatus to contain anger. What comparable effort goes into capping a rent or raising a wage?

Yet there is something more interesting than the apparatus: the words "Acte III". A third date implies that the first two did not suffice, and that something is being organised, week by week, with lycée and university students joining wage earners strangled by prices. This is how one learns, by walking: the struggle for bread becomes a political question, then a question of power. No perfect strike fund or ideal organisation is required in advance; Rosa Luxemburg mocked those who waited for such a moment before acting, because action itself forms and gathers people.

The trap, next, will be that of reform. A bonus, a cheque, a ministerial concession can soothe without changing anything. The test is simple: does the measure strengthen the confidence and organisation of those who marched, or does it send them home, thanked and disarmed? What power gives one day under pressure, it takes back when profits demand it.

We will see tonight what the marches have said, and what the government chose to hear. Quiet streets are not always resigned streets: sometimes it is simply the silence of a tide gathering its strength.