5 November: 193 processions against contempt, and a government pretending not to hear a thing

According to Le Monde, 193 processions marched across France on Thursday 5 November, called by an intersyndicale (a coalition of trade unions) joined by high-school and student movements, "gilets jaunes" (the yellow-vest protest movement) and farmers. The daily gathered the reasons of several demonstrators. Its headline gives one, quoted: "It's too much contempt to stay at home".

What the dispatch does not say is how many took part, what the precise demands of each procession were, or how the government responded. We will not make them up. What the headline already says is enough, and it says a great deal: people do not take to the street only over a figure, an age or a pay scale, but because they feel treated as a variable to be adjusted.

Contempt, precisely. Our reading is this: it is not a character flaw of ill-mannered ministers, it is a mode of government. When some are asked to work longer, others to settle for less, and everyone to be "responsible", there is no discussion, only notification. The concepts of the Marxist tradition are useful here: exploitation, they argue, is structural and does not require a cruel boss. Record profits alongside frozen wages, productivity gains that never reach the payslip, there is the surplus-value relationship made visible. Contempt is merely its polite expression, or rather its impolite one.

The makeup of the march is itself a lesson. High-schoolers, students, employees, farmers, "gilets jaunes": very different social positions, but the same sense of being ordered to obey. Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian mass strikes at the start of the twentieth century, that they almost always began from a partial conflict, a wage in one workshop, a pension fund for railwaymen, before tipping into the political. She judged "absolutely false" the pedantic view that cleanly separates the economic struggle from the political one (our translation, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). We do not claim that France in 2026 is replaying 1905; that would be absurd. But the idea holds: you cannot file anger into drawers, "social" on one side, "political" on the other.

The unions, for their part, are doing their job: contesting the price and duration of work. This is necessary, and it is also limited, since it tackles the effects more than the wage system itself. But an intersyndicale march has another effect, less easily counted: it teaches scattered people that they are many. This is also why debates over the right to strike, picket restrictions or "essential services" are so bitter: they set the dose of power we are willing to tolerate in those who work.

The Republic has nonetheless engraved "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" on the façades of its town halls. One could suggest adding "Considération"; it would cost less than a reform. In the meantime, those who marched on Thursday are answering in their own way: since they are not being heard at home, they will go and make themselves heard outside.