Nuñez warns of 'very high' risk of violence before 31 October: order before debate

According to franceinfo, Laurent Nuñez, France's Interior Minister, wrote to the prefects to warn them that "the risk of urban violence is very high" ahead of the mobilisation on 31 October. Still according to franceinfo, he says "multiple calls to gather in town centres" have been spotted, particularly on social media. That is, for now, all we know. We do not have the full text of the letter. We do not know what specific evidence underpins this assessment, what instructions the prefects have been given, or who is calling for what.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First remark: the order of the words. Before a mobilisation has even taken place, here it is presented by its risk. The minister is doing his job, you will say: preventing, anticipating. No doubt. But a letter that talks about trouble before it talks about demands sets the frame before the first banner has been unfurled. When you announce the storm, nobody asks any more why people went out without an umbrella.

Second remark: the phrase "social media". It suggests a movement without a face, one that springs out of a click. Yet mass mobilisations often arise from sparks that seem tiny, and they educate their participants faster than any party school. The real question is whether this anger turns into lasting organisation: assemblies, committees, delegates, demands written by those who carry them. The dispatch says nothing of the kind, and that is precisely the gap the ministerial letter fills in its own way, through the register of security.

Third remark, more structural. The police, the prefectures and the circulars are not neutral arbiters dropped from the sky. Even the most nuanced Marxists concede that the state enjoys a relative autonomy and that it is also a terrain of struggle. But its horizon remains to keep the existing order standing. To label a gathering a threat in advance is to hand the state apparatus a ready-made justification for how it will handle it. If the day passes calmly, we will be told the precautions worked. If it gets out of hand, we will be told we said so. The bet is risk-free for the one who places it.

What, then, should be demanded? Not that there may be no clashes, but that this mobilisation be judged on what it is calling for. The lycée pupils, the unions, the collectives: what are they saying? Until we hear them in the minister's mouth, we will have a warning without an interlocutor, a dialogue in which only one side has the floor and the other has the baton in prospect.

A democracy that listens to the street only through its prefects' notes ends up hearing nothing but the echo of its own anxiety.