5 November: 70,000 police for a demonstration declared by the book

The facts first, as Le Monde reports them: on the eve of the 5 November mobilisation, interior minister Laurent Nuñez announces the deployment of 70,000 police officers and gendarmes. He warns that "no excesses will be tolerated". The authorities expect "a little over 220 street actions", most of which were declared by the intersyndicale (the grouping of the main trade unions). The briefing says nothing, for now, about the cost of the operation, how the forces are distributed or how many participants are expected. We will not invent it.

What we can read, and what is our analysis rather than an established fact, is another matter. Seventy thousand officers: it is a figure that speaks before anyone has even marched. When most of the rallies have been declared to the prefecture, by the book, one wonders what is actually being prepared: the policing of a right, or the deterrence of its exercise? The line about "excesses" has one virtue: it places the procession under suspicion in advance. The employee who hesitated to lose a day's pay will perhaps hesitate even more before this backdrop of vans.

Note also the question nobody asks on the evening news: who pays? The unions declared, informed, organised. The State, for its part, mobilises tens of thousands of civil servants, overtime included, to watch over people who are demanding, at bottom, not to work more or not to earn less. There is a neat budgetary paradox here: the public authority always finds the means to guard a demonstration, and rarely the means to meet its demands.

The debates over strike pickets, restrictions on marches or "essential services" are, at bottom, debates about the room for manoeuvre granted to employees. The strike and the street are the only lever available to those who sell their time. If you make its use more expensive, through fear or through apparatus, you rebalance the power relationship, discreetly, without changing a single line of the labour code. This struggle over the price of labour (wages, hours, conditions) is necessary, Marx said, even if it does not settle the question of the wage system itself. Still, one must be able to wage it.

The Republic taught us that the freedom to demonstrate is a fundamental freedom. It never specified that it had to be exercised under the eye of 70,000 uniforms. If the minister wants everything to pass calmly, there is an inexpensive means: listen to what the processions are saying. We will see tomorrow whether the police were deployed to protect the right to demonstrate, or to discourage it.