Paris bans the Interfac march: young people asked to protest on the outskirts

According to Le Monde, the Paris police prefecture has banned the march that Interfac Île-de-France, a student and school union, had planned for Tuesday in the heart of the capital, as part of the school and student movement. The authorities have proposed an alternative route on the outskirts. Interfac refuses it and intends to take the matter to the administrative court. The dispatch says nothing more: we do not know the specific grounds the prefecture has cited, the proposed route, the size of the expected procession, or what the judge will decide.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The move is a classic one, and that is what makes it instructive. You do not ban a march; you "move" it. The right to demonstrate is recognised, on condition that it is exercised where nobody passes: far from the ministries, far from the shop windows, far from prying eyes. A procession relegated to the outskirts remains a procession on paper, but it loses what gave it its force: visibility, the confrontation with power. Interfac's refusal therefore strikes us as less a quibble over routes than a matter of principle: what is the point of demonstrating if nobody can see you?

Behind this lies a question of real democracy. Rosa Luxemburg reminded us in Reform or Revolution: democracy has become embarrassing for the bourgeoisie, but it is indispensable to the working class, because it is by exercising its rights, by fighting for them, that it becomes conscious of its interests (our translation, after chapter 8). Let us transpose without forcing it: for young people, the street is a school. Secondary pupils and students learn there to organise, to debate, to stand their ground. To keep them out is to choose to cut the lesson short.

It will be objected that public order has its demands, and that the administrative judge will rule. Very well. The appeal is the normal channel, and there is no harm in seeing in it an opportunity. But let us keep a sense of proportion about what a court can do: it arbitrates a route, it does not manufacture a movement. Mass mobilisations often begin with a tiny spark, and they teach those who take part far faster than any party school. What remains is the question that matters, the one posed by every youth revolt: will anger turn into lasting organisation, with its assemblies, its delegates, its habits of collective decision-making?

A ban may paradoxically help with that. Nothing welds a procession together better than a door slammed in its face. On one condition: that Interfac does not content itself with pleading before a judge, but also knows how to speak to the street. For one can confine a parade to the suburbs; one cannot put under house arrest a generation that has decided to be heard.