5,000 Police Custody Arrests: Faced with the Cost-of-Living Crisis, the State Answers with Cells

According to franceinfo, nearly 5,000 people have been placed in garde à vue (police custody) and 329 jailed since 17 October, Gérald Darmanin announced. Also according to franceinfo, hundreds of thousands of people marched again across France on Saturday, for the third consecutive Saturday of protest against the cost of living.

Those are the facts. What follows is our reading, not an established finding. The dispatch is thin: it says nothing about the grounds for these custody detentions, nor about what separates those that led to prosecution from those that ended at dawn. It does not specify how many of these 329 imprisonments involve proven violence, nor how many convictions followed. We are waiting for those figures. A minister who waves them without breakdown turns statistics into an argument from authority.

For a number of this size is also a message. Five thousand custody detentions in a fortnight is a medium-sized town passing through the police station. To whom is it addressed? Less to the rioters, hypothetical and a minority, than to the hundreds of thousands of others: those hesitating to come out again next Saturday, weighing the risk of a night in a cell against the price of petrol and the shopping basket. Repression here serves to raise the cost of anger when one refuses to tackle its cause.

We will be told that public order demands it. Fine. But note the asymmetry: faced with a movement born of rising prices, the government's fastest response is criminal, not social. Rents, energy and food do not go before the magistrate in immediate appearance. The government is managing the symptom with the tools it knows best, those of the police.

Luxemburg saw it: great mass movements often arise from a spark that seems modest, and they educate faster than any party school. Three weeks of marches are precisely that: people discovering, while walking, that their end-of-month shortfall is not a private misfortune but a political question. To criminalise this apprenticeship is to try to shut the classroom.

Then there is the awkward question, which we pose without certainty: will this anger turn into lasting organisation, into assemblies, committees, strikes, or will it dissipate from one Saturday to the next? Cautious reformers are already waiting to be offered a round table, preferably with nobody sitting at it. A concession wrung out by the street can be withdrawn as soon as the street empties; that is the test to apply to any promise that follows.

A power that counts its custody detentions the way others count their successes mostly confesses that it has no answer to the question posed. And an unanswered question, as we know, always ends up coming back to the street, more numerous.