5 November: intelligence flags the strike as "high risk", not its demands

According to franceinfo, the DNRT (the domestic intelligence service, or renseignement territorial) has classed the 5 November day of mobilisation as "high risk". A memo consulted by the broadcaster projects between 500,000 and 700,000 people in the marches, outside the Paris region, and fears considerable violence and damage. That is what we know. The rest of the memo, its detail, its sources, how much is forecast and how much is fear, we know nothing about at this stage. And franceinfo's summary does not say a word about the demands of the intersyndicale, the united union front.

This is precisely where our reading lies, and it should be taken as such, not as an established fact. An intelligence memo's job is to measure disorder. It counts heads, anticipates shop windows, sorts days into "red" or "orange". It never asks why half a million people agree to lose a day's pay to march in the November rain. Yet the question deserves asking: pensions, public services, the length and price of work, these are matters of wages and hours, not street furniture.

The method is well worn. Violence is announced before the march sets off, the press repeats the announcement, and the public debate shifts before the first step is even taken: we will discuss shopkeepers' safety rather than the age of retirement. That the memo "leaked" to the press the evening before is no natural fate. A day presented as dangerous discourages the hesitant, worries families and prepares public opinion for preventive arrests. The framing is already doing part of the deterrent work.

Unions, as the house notes remind us, fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. This is necessary, not sufficient, but it is also where workers learn their strength. And the rules on picketing, public order or "essential services" simply set the level of pressure they are allowed to apply. Classing a strike as "high risk" is a way of lowering that ceiling without passing a law.

Rosa Luxemburg, watching the great Russian strikes, noted that they almost always begin with a very concrete conflict: a pension fund for railwaymen, the length of the working day for shop assistants, a wage in a small factory. The "political" emerges from the economic, and no clear border can be drawn between them. This is what intelligence cannot categorise: an anger that begins with a payslip and ends by asking who decides.

The Republic likes to remind us that the right to strike is constitutional. Fine. The task is not to turn it, through a memo, into a precondition for maintaining public order. Tomorrow, they will count the marches. We would do well to also count the hours of life this reform asks us to surrender, and which the memo does not mention.