Macron and Lecornu face colères that keep piling up: authority has lost its grip

According to Le Monde, a new day of protest opens on Saturday 31 October, and the executive, with Emmanuel Macron and Sébastien Lecornu at its head, fears an explosion of violence in public space. Still according to the paper, the government is casting around for levers against what it describes as a "sédimentation des colères" (a build-up of anger, layer upon layer), yet has no room for manoeuvre to command authority, or even to be heard. The details of the demands, the marches and the forces mobilised are not in the summary we have: we will not invent them.

From there, here is our reading. The word "sédimentation" is telling. Anger that settles layer after layer cannot be defused by a one-off concession or a communications gesture. This is not a movement you negotiate with an identifiable interlocutor; it is an entire ground that is compacting. And a government looking for the right button is discovering there is no control panel.

We would like to see a simple communications crisis here: explain better, listen better, change the tone. It is the favourite consolation of managers. But an authority that no longer makes itself heard does not lack pedagogy; it lacks credibility. Legitimacy that flows from above, from a past election and a state apparatus, wears away when those below no longer recognise anything of their own lives in it. The power speaks, the country shrugs, then takes to the street.

There is a cruel irony in the officially voiced fear of "violence". The theorists of reformism dreamed of a civilised class struggle, reduced to a parliamentary duel in which the street would have no say. Rosa Luxemburg noted as much in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions: history answered otherwise, through mass strikes, which turn street confrontation into one moment among others in a long political struggle. When the chamber no longer carries anger, anger seeks other stages.

The trap, for the left as for the unions, would be to play firefighter for the executive. The useful question is not how to help power win back an audience, but whether each day of mobilisation raises the confidence and organisation of those who take part, or wears them down. Anger that accumulates without structure ends as a flash in the pan or as weariness; anger that organises from below, in workplaces, neighbourhoods and assemblies, becomes a force.

At the Élysée as at Matignon, they are looking for levers. Perhaps they should first admit that you do not run a country the way you work a lock: when the water has been rising for months, it is not the sluice gate you should watch, it is the dam.