Route imposée: the Conseil d'État puts the street back on the pavement

According to franceinfo, the Conseil d'État (France's highest administrative court) has overturned the decision of the Paris administrative tribunal, which had sided with the organisers of the 31 October mobilisation: they had demanded a route between Bastille and Nation. Protesters will therefore march between the porte de Bagnolet and the porte de Charenton. Still according to franceinfo, the intersyndicale is set to meet to decide what follows for the movement. The same outlet mentions an exceptional security arrangement put in place by the government for this third day of demonstrations. What the dispatch does not say: the Conseil d'État's reasoning, nor the precise demands of the day. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

One judge said yes to the Place de la République, another said no. The scene is instructive. We are told that the courts are neutral referees; yet when it comes to deciding where the procession has the right to exist, it is public order, as the state defines it, that gets the final word. The state is not a simple wall: it is also a terrain of struggle, and the first ruling proves it. But its limits show quickly. Bastille-Nation is the memory of the marches; Bagnolet-Charenton is the periphery, the ring road where you march without being seen. Geography is a politics.

The real question, however, is not the route. It lies in the meeting to come. An intersyndicale that gathers to "decide what follows" reveals what it is: a general staff scheduling days of action. Day after day, the mobilisation becomes a spaced-out ritual, switched on and off, while decisions are made elsewhere. Rosa Luxemburg already mocked those who waited for perfect organisation and a full treasury before acting: events, she wrote in substance, liberate workers long before the organisational ideal is ready.

The measure of a strategy is what it does to the trust of those who carry it. A negotiation that wrests a concession but sends everyone home manages capital more than it fights it. A mobilisation in which assemblies of workers, high-school students and neighbourhood residents decide for themselves on continuation, targets and route learns by walking. It no longer depends on a ruling from the Palais-Royal to know where to put its feet.

We still do not know what the intersyndicale will decide. But if the street waits for orders, it will have lost more than a route. Ring roads have this going for them: by circling the city long enough, you sometimes end up taking it from behind.