70,000 Police for 7 November: Order Before Anger

According to Le Monde, some 70,000 police officers and gendarmes will be mobilised on Saturday 7 November in the face of risks of violence, looting and spontaneous gatherings. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has announced that the reinforced checks are being "renewed", with systematic protection of city centres. That's the news. The rest is our reading.

What the dispatch does not say weighs almost as much as what it does. At this stage we do not know what demands the marches carry, how many people are expected, or on what basis the assessment of the "risks of looting" rests. The vocabulary chosen, by contrast, is crystal clear: we hear of smashing, of spontaneous gatherings, of city centres to be protected. Of the social movement, its reasons, its anger, there is no mention.

That is where the set is revealed. The state is not an impartial referee in a fluorescent yellow vest standing at the edge of the pitch. The police, like the courts or the budget, belong to an order of property that they protect first. More recent Marxists qualify the point: the state enjoys a relative autonomy, and it is also a site of struggle. But when 70,000 uniforms deploy to sanctify the shop windows, the ordering of priorities leaps out. City centres are marketplaces before they are public squares.

Note also the target: the "spontaneous gatherings". What is feared is precisely what Rosa Luxemburg regarded as the living force of great movements: the initiative that springs up without permission, from a tiny spark, and educates thousands of people faster than any party school. Lenin would reply that organisation is needed so that the impulse does not dissipate; the debate is legitimate, and it arises here. But when power grids spontaneity in advance, it claims to dispense with the debate: it neutralises the movement before it has chosen its forms.

The method has its effectiveness. A deployment of this scale deters, wears people down, turns the demonstration into an endurance test and a ledger of incidents. By evening, the discussion will centre on the number of arrests rather than on what put people in the street. It is the old trick of order: shifting the social question into the security question.

None of this is to deny that violence can occur, nor to disparage the officers deployed, who carry out instructions. It is the political logic of those instructions that needs scrutiny. A government that answers anger with a cordon rather than an answer is not managing a crisis: it is managing the scenery of the crisis.

On Saturday, we shall see whether the street lets itself be boxed in. The cordons know how to count the protesters; they have never known how to count what they learn while marching.