5 November: 70,000 police officers face the strikers, the deployment before the dialogue

According to franceinfo, the unions are calling an interprofessional day of mobilisation on Thursday 5 November, and Laurent Nuñez has announced 70,000 police officers and gendarmes deployed, "exactly the same deployment" as on 31 October. Still according to franceinfo, the marches are expected to be swelled by secondary-school pupils and students dissatisfied with the government's first responses to their demands. What we do not know at this stage: the detail of the union demands reported in the dispatch, the number of protesters expected, and how the day will unfold. Nothing suggests clashes are coming, and we are not assuming any.

The rest is our reading. Note the arithmetic of power: we know to the exact figure how many civil servants will be deployed to contain the anger, but the dispatch says nothing about what is offered to those who carry it. Seventy thousand agents is an answer. It is not an answer to the question being asked. When the state is questioned on wages, working time or the life that remains after work, it replies with logistics.

It will be said that maintaining order is the state's job, and that prevention is better than cure. Fair enough. But a deployment "identical" to the one the week before also tells a story of routine: the demonstration treated as a risk to be managed rather than a voice to be heard. The right to strike, let us recall, is guaranteed by the preamble of the 1946 Constitution "within the framework of the laws that regulate it". The Republic loves to quote the first half of the sentence on anniversaries, and the second on parade days.

On substance, trade unionism fights over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. Marx saw such struggle as necessary but insufficient, since it attacks the effects rather than the wage system itself. Still, it is the school of solidarity, and one can measure workers' bargaining power by the room left for exercising it: the right to strike, picket lines, an elastic definition of "essential services". When productivity gains never reach the payslip, the strike is less a whim than a reminder of the bill.

The expected arrival of pupils and students is also instructive. Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian mass strikes, that movements are born from a partial conflict, a wage, a pension fund, a working day, and then widen. Without transposing Saint Petersburg to Paris, the lesson stands: a sectoral demand that finds an echo elsewhere soon stops being sectoral. The young people marching already know what awaits them: long careers, short wages.

We wish this day remains peaceful, and that all participants, demonstrators and police alike, get home unharmed. But we would like to see, one day, the government deploy as many resources to negotiate as to watch.