5 November strike: 575,000 or 1.6 million, and Matignon gets out the drawing-room

According to Le Monde, the mobilisation on Thursday 5 November brought together between 575,000 and 1.6 million people across France. The CGT (the country's largest union confederation, usually counted as the left-leaning one) claims close to 1.6 million marchers, including 350,000 in Paris; the Interior Ministry (the French equivalent of the Home Office) counts 575,000, including 65,000 in the capital. A "social conference" bringing together unions and employers is scheduled for Monday at Matignon, the prime minister's official residence. What the government will put on the table, the dispatch does not say. So we do not know.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the arithmetic. A gap of one to nearly three is not a counting error; it is a political quarrel. Each side counts in order to weigh in: the smaller the crowd, the more inevitable the reform appears; the bigger it is, the more necessary negotiation becomes. The march is a balance of power, and the number is its first battlefield.

Next, the drawing-room. Summoning unions and employers to Matignon three days after the street is the old reflex of the Republic: we have listened to the people so well that we invite them to sit down. It can be a victory, proof that the strike carries weight. It can also be an absorption: a million placards turned into a few armchairs, several months of timetable and a final communiqué. Everything will depend on what is put on the agenda, and on who decides at the end.

What can really be won? The unions are fighting over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. Marx considered this struggle necessary but insufficient, because it corrects effects without touching the wage system itself. Still, it counts. When productivity gains never reach the payslip, and profits coexist with frozen wages, the strike reminds us that wealth is produced by those who receive the least of it. It is this unpaid share that purchasing power, working hours and pensions put at stake, even when no one names it.

Rosa Luxemburg observed that the great Russian mass strikes almost always began with a partial conflict (a wage, a cut in hours, a pension fund) before growing into politics. She considered the clean border between economic and political struggle to be false. For her, the strike cannot be confined to the "social": demanding fewer hours is already asking who decides how life is lived.

On Monday, then, we will see whether Matignon responds on substance, or whether it offers coffee. The street has spoken, with a disputed figure. The only reliable measure will be the one on the payslip and the age of departure.