The Louvre closed early: France's second weekend of protest

On Saturday morning the Louvre’s glass pyramid sat empty. The museum, with the Orsay, the Orangerie, the Grand Palais, the Picasso and the Petit Palais, had said the day before that it would not open; the Paris Opera closed both of its houses, the art fair in the capital cancelled its weekend programme, and the shops along the Champs-Élysées and around the Place Vendôme put plywood over their windows for the second time in a week. Twenty metro stations stayed shut. The city spent 24 October behind a security cordon, waiting for the second act of a protest movement the government had tried to ban and could not stop.

By the interior ministry’s count, 410,000 people marched across France that day, 110,000 of them in Paris. The CGT, the country’s largest union federation, counted 800,000 nationally and 250,000 in the capital. Both figures are down from the week before, when the ministry recorded 550,000 and the unions again claimed 800,000, but neither suggests the movement is losing its numbers. The complaints have not changed since the autumn began: wages that trail fuel and food prices, school and hospital budgets that keep shrinking, rents that swallow the month before it ends.

The week before had produced the worst street violence France has suffered in years. On 17 October the interior ministry recorded 2,397 arrests, almost a thousand police and gendarmes injured, and at least 3,000 shops looted or damaged. The tourism office in Lyon burned; so did the town hall in Limoges. Macron went on television the next evening to promise that the perpetrators would be punished, and on Thursday, after a security meeting with his ministers and intelligence chiefs, he gave a blunt answer to the next call for a march: demonstrations organized by anyone other than the unions would be banned. Marseille and Lyon forbade the rallies outright in their city centres; Paris moved the permitted route away from the commercial core and announced 70,000 police and gendarmes on duty, 10,000 more than a week earlier.

The strategy contained the damage, and the official account is eager to say so. In Paris the cortège walked from the Porte d’Italie to the Porte de Vincennes in the rain and, for most of the afternoon, in calm. Around five in the evening, at the end of the route, some five hundred people dressed in black threw projectiles at the police lines; the police answered with a water cannon and tear gas while a gendarmerie helicopter circled overhead. The prefecture recorded 3,000 identity checks and 65 arrests in the capital. Laurent Nuñez, the interior minister, put the national figure at close to 1,000 arrests by nightfall and called the marches largely ‘calm’. In Toulouse a twenty-year-old protester was taken to hospital with a serious hand injury after clashes at the end of the rally.

The tension moved elsewhere. In Lyon the prefecture confined the crowds to a single district in the south and dispersed everything else; the result was a city centre that stood empty, kept ‘safe’ at the cost of its own afternoon. In Nice, men with white armbands, most of them masked, stood behind the police lines and said they had come to protect the shopkeepers. In Montpellier a fitness influencer with a large Telegram following had called for volunteers to guard the shops, and several hundred appeared. Whatever those groups are, the street now has a second presence that did not exist before October, and the two sides organize around each other.

A government that bans marches and boards up its museums can claim it kept the peace; it cannot claim it answered the complaints. The gap between the two crowd counts, 410,000 and 800,000, is itself part of the argument: the ministry’s lower number suits a government trying to show the wave is ebbing, the unions’ higher one suits a movement trying to show it is not. Last week’s rioting gave the government its reason to tighten everything; treating peaceful marchers and the ‘casseurs’ under the same rules, though, hands the next rally its script. Some groups have already called for a third day on 31 October. The unions have fixed 5 November, the start of the school half-term, for a national strike, and their leader, Sophie Binet, said after meeting the prime minister that nothing offered so far justified calling it off. Macron has scheduled talks with the protesters’ representatives for Monday 26 October; nothing in that agenda suggests the marchers will hear anything they have not heard since September.