Grenades against the cost of living: the state answers anger with shrapnel

According to Mediapart, Alaric, Carla, Pierre and Lou were seriously injured by different types of grenades during the "against the cost of living" mobilisation, in Paris, Rennes and Lyon. The article describes burns, bodies riddled with fragments, holes in calves. These four people, the paper writes, have not got their physical integrity back. And three of them have not filed a complaint.

What we don't yet know: in what precise circumstances each was hit, which units were deployed, what orders were given. The dispatch does not say, and we will not invent it. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with this judicial silence, which speaks volumes. Why do three of the four injured not file complaints? The dispatch does not give their reasons; we can simply observe that complaining against the police means asking an institution to judge itself, with the time, money and exhaustion that entails. When the remedy is this discouraging, impunity no longer needs to be decreed: it settles in on its own.

Next comes the question people willingly sidestep: who authorises these weapons, and for what purpose? A grenade is not an accident of the job; it is an equipment choice, approved at the top, budgeted, distributed. The police are not a neutral referee standing at the edge of the pitch. In the Marxist tradition, they belong to a state apparatus whose primary function is to guarantee the order of property and accumulation. One can qualify this, recall that the state is also a terrain of struggle; yet the limits of that terrain are drawn where capital begins to worry.

Now, what was this mobilisation demanding? The ability to live with dignity when everything keeps getting more expensive. A demand that is settled through social measures, wages, prices, accounts to be given. Instead, it is answered with fragments of metal. The choice of force over concession is no misunderstanding: it tells us whom the authorities think deserve consideration.

Cautious reformers will explain that one must "calm things down", wait for a report, a commission, an amendment. Luxemburg knew them well: a concession wrested from power can be taken back as soon as profits demand it, and the true measure of a political gesture is whether it strengthens the confidence and power of those at the bottom, or demobilises them. A grenade settles the question in its own way: it demobilises through fear.

We must state soberly what these four wounds have of the permanent. Holes in calves are not patched up with a press release. But the movement does not have to choose between its wounded and its anger; it can hold both, and demand accountability from those who sign the orders.

A power that answers the cost of living with shrapnel always ends up revealing what it truly considers costly: not the bodies, but the silence it is denied.