31 October: Marching to Be Allowed to Keep Marching

According to Le Monde, around 500,000 people marched on Saturday 31 October across France, according to the organisers; the authorities put the figure at 320,000. The paper describes processions that are both festive and determined, whose original demands remain as pressing as ever, week after week. It adds that marchers are increasingly worried about obstruction and intimidation by the public authorities. One participant sums it up: "I march so that we can march."

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. Let's start with the arithmetic, that national sport: a gap of 180,000 people between the two figures. Nobody in the wire report offers us a counting method, and we won't invent one. Let's simply note that even at the lower estimate, 320,000 people in the street on a Saturday is not a detail to be filed under "mobilisation falling". And that the disagreement over the number is already a disagreement over meaning: to count small is to say it doesn't matter.

The most striking thing is not the number but the duration. Week after week, says Le Monde. A movement that lasts like this is not a fit of anger; it is a habit being formed. Rosa Luxemburg observed that the great waves of mass strikes began with a local conflict, a pay packet, working hours, a pension fund, before very quickly passing through every stage up to the political demonstration. We won't claim that 2026 is replaying 1905; that would be ridiculous, and the report doesn't allow it. But the lesson holds: you can't separate for long the wage from the right to assemble to demand it.

This is where the security "corset" becomes political. The paper's own notes remind us that debates over restrictions on picket lines, gatherings or "essential services" are debates about how much room for manoeuvre workers are granted. To fence in, filter and intimidate is to lower the balance of power before the procession has even set off. The Republic proclaims the freedom to demonstrate; it seems to practise it the way one serves a lukewarm dish, with reservations.

We do not know, at this stage, which specific measures have been applied or to what extent: the report sticks to the general picture, and so do we. What remains are the demands, which some would like to bury beneath the question of public order. Working time, pensions, wages: the old quarrel over who owns the hours of our lives. When productivity gains never seem to reach the payslip, it is hardly surprising that people leave the workshop to say so in the street. And it is rather rich to ask them to do it in a corridor.