In Charleville-Mézières, working-class anger stays calm, and the far right profits

In Charleville-Mézières, prefecture of the Ardennes, which retains, according to Le Monde, the look of a rural and working-class France, the social mobilisation passed off without incident, far from the scenes of looting seen elsewhere. The paper describes a town where, against a backdrop of economic precarity, the pull of the extremes divides the social fabric, even inside families. One resident sums it up, quoted by Le Monde: "The fractures have multiplied over time, fears rising without ever coming back down."

What the report does not tell us is what is concretely organising on the ground: which unions, which collectives, which assemblies. We will not invent it. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

We would like a peaceful march to be good news in itself. It is, obviously: nobody wants to see a street burn. But calm says nothing about strength. An anger that marches in orderly fashion and then goes home, with nowhere to talk things through or decide, leaves the ground free for those who offer a culprit within easy reach. The fear that "rises without ever coming back down" is precisely what a deindustrialised town produces when the factory closes and nothing replaces it, neither jobs nor a collective.

This is where the old quarrel between spontaneity and organisation stops being academic. Mass movements teach faster than any party school, the Luxemburgist tradition says in substance; but what is learned still needs somewhere to settle. Without a lasting framework, the momentum fades, and resentment, for its part, always finds a taker. When the far-right vote passes from one household to the next and divides brothers at the dinner table, it means class solidarity no longer has an address.

Nor will the answer come from the managers. Concessions won by organised workers count, but capital takes them back when its profits demand it; a reformism that makes the measure its goal ends up administering decline. The only test that matters: does this measure increase the power and confidence of wage earners, or does it demobilise them? A one-off aid, a "revitalisation" plan decided elsewhere, fails that test.

Democracy, finally, is not a backdrop here. Luxemburg held it indispensable to workers, because it is by exercising it, in the struggle for it, that they become aware of their common interests. In Charleville, that means assemblies in the workshop, in the closed factory, in the neighbourhood, where people decide rather than endure. It is slow, thankless, without cameras.

Looting makes the pictures; quiet dignity makes the silences. The question is whether this silence is that of resignation or of a town preparing something: an anger that learns to sit around a table is never quite calm.