Act III: up to 500,000 on the streets, and the social anger shows no sign of easing

According to France 24, the marches of the "Act III" (the third weekend of the gilets jaunes protests) of social anger drew between 320,000 and 500,000 people. They were generally peaceful, but clashes broke out in the late afternoon in several major cities, including Paris. That much we know. The rest we still don't: the detail of the demands made in each march, the number of injured or arrests, the precise origin of the clashes. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

Let's start with the arithmetic, that national sport. A gap of 180,000 people between two estimates is almost a medium-sized town appearing or vanishing depending on who is counting. We know the ritual: some inflate, others deflate, and everyone swears the street is on their side. What is not in dispute is that a third Saturday of mobilisation still brings out hundreds of thousands of people. This is not a flash in the pan; it is a habit taking root.

Why the habit? Because the question running through these marches is as old as the factory: who gets what, in return for how many hours of life. The unions, we are often reminded, fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. That is necessary, Marx would say, but not sufficient, because it treats the symptoms without touching the wage system itself. Yet when prices rise faster than payslips, and productivity gains evaporate before they reach those who produce them, the exploitative relationship becomes visible to the naked eye, including at the supermarket checkout. No cruel boss is needed: the mechanism is enough.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this spills over. Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian mass strikes, that a conflict begins with a partial economic demand and passes almost imperceptibly into the political, to the point where it is "almost impossible to draw a dividing line" (our translation, The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions). Commentators like to file anger into two drawers, the social on one side and the political on the other. The street has never read the filing system.

On the clashes, let us be sober. The violence at the end of the day is real, it will be replayed endlessly, and it risks swallowing everything else: 500,000 people marching peacefully make for poorer television than a smashed shop window. We have no details here to assign responsibility, and we will not pretend otherwise. But note the familiar mechanism: the more the clashes are discussed, the less purchasing power is discussed.

The Republic has enshrined in its preamble the right of everyone to obtain "adequate means of existence" (the preamble to the 1946 Constitution, part of France's constitutional bloc). When hundreds of thousands of people come out to remind it of this three Saturdays running, the government has two options: respond on wages, or count the marchers. It is not hard to guess which is cheaper, in the short term.