Cost of living: court opens Rue de la Bastille to Nation, but the question remains open

According to Libération, the "acte III" of the "cost of living" mobilisation will see, on Saturday 31 October, intentions of action and plans for marches spreading across the country. In Paris, the administrative court finally authorised the route between Bastille and Nation. The daily also mentions a police arrangement. Beyond these details, the report says nothing about the expected scale of the marches, nor about the specific organisations calling for them, nor about the nature of the police deployment: we do not yet know. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

There is first this detail, which says a great deal: to march from one end of eastern Paris to the other, it was necessary to appear before a judge. The right to demonstrate exists, but it is negotiated, argued for, conceded. Libération's "finally" describes an authorisation wrested rather than granted. We are meant to believe that the police, the courts and the prefectures are mere arbiters. In fact they are institutions shaped to protect an order of property, even if they are also a terrain of struggle, and even if the judge sometimes sides with the street. Good. But a route won in court remains a route under surveillance.

Next, the substance. The high cost of living is not an accident of the economic cycle: it is the measure of how little wages weigh against profit. An "acte III" already signals the weariness of a calendar, the risk of the ritual procession: a date, a route, an aerial photograph, then a Monday that looks like Friday. This is where the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg is useful, without caricaturing it. She did not scorn days of action or reforms wrested from power; she simply asked what they do to those who win them. Do they raise confidence and power, or do they send people home reassured by a bonus? A concession that employers and the state take back as soon as profits demand it is nothing more than a loan.

The real test on Saturday, then, is not just the number of demonstrators, which we do not yet know. It is what the intersyndicale will do with it. Will it be content to count heads and wait to be invited to talks, or will it let the assemblies, the workplaces and the neighbourhoods take the lead? Luxemburg wrote that a mass movement cannot be decreed from an office: it learns by walking, and leaderships have a duty to accompany it rather than to regulate its mechanics.

As for the executive, we will be watching its response: policing first, since the deployment has already been announced; social measures afterwards, if they come at all. A government that deploys cordons before it has opened its chequebook makes clear enough where its priorities lie.

On Saturday, between Bastille and Nation, we will find out whether the street has merely won a route or intends to invent a direction of its own. A route can be marked out; a anger, however, does not ask the court for its itinerary.