Grenades and tear gas: Nuñez refuses to back down as high school students are injured

According to franceinfo, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez "will not renounce any intermediate means" at demonstrations, grenades and tear gas included. Deputies had asked him to abandon the use of grenades by the security forces after serious injuries to high school students during the mobilisation. His answer, again according to franceinfo: "Repression, it does not exist." The dispatch gives neither the number of injured nor the details of their injuries, and we will not invent them. Let us first think of these pupils, and of their families.

Here is our reading. The word "intermédiaire" is a masterpiece of administrative modesty. It suggests a happy medium between speech and violence, a gentle in-between, almost a tool of mediation. But when that in-between lands on the body of a teenager, the vocabulary stops being neutral. To say that repression "does not exist" while defending the arsenal that makes it possible is to ask the wounded to believe the communiqué rather than their own flesh.

Classical Marxism reminds us that the police, the courts and the budget are not arbiters dropped from the sky: they are institutions shaped by property relations and charged, in the last instance, with protecting them. The state does have a relative autonomy, and it is also a terrain of struggle, which is precisely why deputies can question it. But its limits show when a movement from below disturbs the established order: one then discovers that maintaining that order comes before the care owed to minors. We do not claim to know the minister's intentions or the circumstances of each injury, which the dispatch does not detail; the question is one of doctrine, not of consciences.

Luxemburg said of the opportunists of German social democracy that they dreamed of a "civilised" class struggle, reduced to a parliamentary duel in which the street would finally be silent. History, she wrote, answered otherwise: through mass movements which, far from abolishing street clashes, bring them back to a moment within a long political battle. We see an echo of that. The chamber debates grenades, the minister replies with a formula, and young people learn in the street what no civics manual will tell them: how the state treats those who organise without it.

Much remains to be established: the extent of the injuries, responsibilities, any follow-up before the courts. The parliamentary debate has not settled it either. But the message is clear: we discuss, we express outrage, we regret, and we keep the grenade. A democracy that defends its arsenal with more energy than it shows for its high school students has a problem, and the problem does not lie with its students.

One may decree that repression does not exist. The remaining task is to explain this to those who bear its marks, and that is where denial, one day, breaks against reality.