Protest on the Periphery: The Prefecture Exiles the CGT and the Gilets Jaunes

According to franceinfo, the Paris police prefecture has banned the routes that the CGT and the gilets jaunes had filed for the 31 October demonstration in the centre of the capital. It is compelling the two processions to "converge" and march on the outskirts, between the Porte de Bagnolet and the Porte de Charenton. What we do not yet know: the specific grounds the prefecture has put forward, the official reaction of the organisers, or how many people are expected. The rest is our reading.

Start with the verb. "Converger" is a lovely word, administrative and gentle, for saying that two processions which wanted to walk their own separate ways now find themselves shunted onto the same tarmac, far from the ministries, far from the shop windows, far from the eyes. The right to demonstrate has not been abolished; it has been relocated. And a demonstration moved out to the périphérique is rather like a family reunion held in the car park.

The geography is far from innocent. A procession that crosses the centre tells those who govern, and those who are out shopping, that the conflict exists and that it has an address. Relegated to the city gates, anger becomes background noise, a traffic nuisance. The Marxist tradition reminds us that the police, the prefectures and their orders are not simple neutral arbiters: they are institutions shaped by an order of property and charged with preserving it. They can become terrain of struggle, with a relative autonomy, but their limits are set by the smooth running of accumulation. When public order is negotiated, it is rarely the order of business that gives ground.

The episode is also a test for democracy as liberals like to praise it. Rosa Luxemburg wrote that democracy, once superfluous or inconvenient for the bourgeoisie, is on the contrary "indispensable" to the working class (our translation, Réforme sociale ou révolution ?). Indispensable because it is in exercising its rights, and in fighting for them, that the proletariat becomes aware of its interests. A right to demonstrate exercised under topographical surveillance is a right one learns to ask for politely. Yet nothing was ever won by asking politely.

There is a piquant detail here: forcing the CGT and the gilets jaunes to march together may be offering them what no union leadership would have dared to organise. Mass movements learn fast, faster than any party school, and nothing says the imposed encounter will remain a mere itinerary. The debate is an old one: does anger dissipate, or does it become lasting organisation? The prefecture has drawn the map; it is for the processions to decide what they make of it.

They wanted to keep them away from the centre. Sometimes the periphery, once filled, ends up becoming the centre.