Cost of living: hundreds of thousands on the streets, and a night under watch

According to Le Monde, several hundred thousand people marched across France on Saturday 31 October against the cost of living. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said early in the evening that the demonstrations had "gone well". He also denounced the "unprecedented violence" of "groups of casseurs" (a term for those who wreck and smash, roughly "hooligans" or "troublemakers"). Still according to the daily, the security forces carried out more than 40,000 identity checks and more than 500 arrests. Partial curfews are due to apply tonight in certain large cities, after calls to mobilise circulated this week. We do not yet know the details of the places concerned, the exact number of marchers or the legal follow-up to the arrests.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Note the order of priorities: the figures that lead the evening's coverage are those of checks and arrests, not those of rents, petrol pumps or supermarket trolleys. Hundreds of thousands of people say they can no longer manage, and the public response begins with a count of police custody cases. Keeping order is a politics of the hour: we worry about the night to come, not the month-ends that keep returning.

The "cost of living" is, however, less a mystery than a social relationship. A wage is meant to cover what it costs to reproduce the workforce: housing, food, healthcare, raising children. When prices rise faster than pay, that equation breaks, and the worker labours as much, or more, to receive less life in return. The surplus produced beyond that wage is profit; it is structural, and does not depend on the wickedness of a boss. Productivity gains, for their part, have an unfortunate habit of evaporating before they reach the payslip. Nothing in the dispatch allows this to be quantified for 2026, but it is precisely the question the marches are raising.

Workers are asked for restraint, employers for "prudence", the state for rigour. Nobody asks rising prices to calm down. The Republic has nonetheless written into its motto an equality that does not stop at the factory gate, and the Preamble of 1946 promises everyone adequate means of existence. It is a text we would do well to reread before bringing out the curfews.

Then there is the old debate: does a day of anger suffice? The struggle over the price of labour, wages and working hours is necessary, but it treats the effects more than the wage system itself. And a movement born in the street can vanish as quickly as it surged if it gives itself neither organisation nor demands sustained over time. Whether this Saturday leads to wage negotiations, coordinated strikes or simply one more night under surveillance, we do not yet know. What is certain is that the one counting the arrested still does not answer the one counting the month-ends.