31 October: the street is packed, but everyone only talks about the troublemakers

According to Le Figaro, the 31 October day was the third day of mobilisation in three weeks. The paper describes a mobilisation that is "still dense", processions that had "mostly moved forward calmly" outside city centres, and then "casseurs and looters" who allegedly engaged in clashes with the security forces "across the whole territory". It speaks of "unprecedented violence" coming from the far left. We have no official count, no figure for the number of protesters, and no precise demands: the summary doesn't give them. The rest is our reading.

Let us start with what is beyond dispute: violence, and looting where it occurs, damages cities and the people who live in them, shopkeepers and passers-by alike. Condemning it is nothing scandalous. But look at the machinery of the narrative. Three weeks of mobilisation, massive and peaceful marches, and the headline keeps what undermines them. The crowd becomes backdrop; a minority becomes the event. The word "casseurs" (literally "breakers", the French term for those who smash things during protests) does the rest: it draws a clean line between the good protester, tolerated as long as he keeps quiet while marching, and the bad one, who can be dealt with without nuance.

That line is not neutral. The police, within the established order, are not an arbiter: they are the institution charged, in the last instance, with protecting an order of property. Marxists today qualify the idea: the state has a relative autonomy, and it is also a terrain of struggle. Still, when maintaining order becomes the central subject of a day of strikes and marches, the social question that drove people into the street slips into the background. That shift suits a good many people.

The real danger for a movement is not only the broken shop window. It is the strategic dead end. Luxemburg noted that tendencies founded on the "first blow" and direct action, revolutionary "in the most crude sense of the pitchfork" (our translation, Grève de masse, parti et syndicats), resurface with every flare-up of open struggle. The gesture of smashing offers the illusion of strength to those who find no other grip. Yet the strength of a mass strike lies elsewhere: in thousands of ordinary people who learn by marching, by gathering, by deciding.

That is where what comes next will be decided. Three days in three weeks is a living school, but a school that must become an organisation: assemblies, strike funds, lasting coordination, failing which anger dissipates and the union leaderships will have nothing left to do but negotiate a compromise. A movement that does not equip itself with its own tools leaves the press to say who it is.

We will soon know whether these calm processions, which nobody puts in a headline, manage to impose their own story. A peaceful crowd that holds on for three weeks frightens more than a broken shop window: that, you cannot sweep away by morning.