The takeaways: Nearly 1,000 people were arrested across France on Saturday as cost-of-living protests entered their fourth consecutive weekend. Turnout fell sharply — 146,000 by the official count, down from 550,000 on October 17 — but the day still ended in tear gas and clashes in Paris. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu meets unions and employers on Monday to talk wages, the first real negotiation since the movement began.
For most of Saturday afternoon, the march through Paris looked like a protest running out of road. The crowds were smaller, the mood flatter, the police lines thicker. Then, as the march reached Place de la Nation at dusk, it turned. Officers fired tear gas at people throwing projectiles and homemade fireworks. A group of around 200 attacked police as they arrested a man who had set fire to a rubbish bin. By the end of the night, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said officers had arrested “nearly 1,000” people nationwide, and described an “extremely elevated level of violence”.
The numbers tell the story of a movement at a crossroads. The Interior Ministry counted 146,000 demonstrators across France on Saturday, 46,000 of them in Paris. The unions put the national figure at 250,000. Either way, it was the smallest Saturday yet — a steep fall from the 550,000 the ministry recorded on October 17, the day the October 17 protests that ended in rioting and looting left thousands of businesses damaged and more than 2,000 people in custody.
Two days earlier, the picture had looked very different. Thursday’s nationwide strike and marches drew 575,000 people by the official count — 1.6 million, according to the CGT, one of France’s biggest union confederations — making it the largest day of demonstrations this autumn. The government had deployed 70,000 police officers and gendarmes for Saturday, 20 percent more than the previous weekend, determined not to see a repeat of the October 17 riots. The heavy deployment may have kept the damage down. It did not keep the peace.
The movement began in mid-September, when high-school students blockaded their schools over crumbling buildings, teacher shortages and a university admissions system they see as unfair. Within weeks it had fused with a much older French grievance: the cost of living. The CGT is demanding a 10 percent rise in the national minimum wage. The more moderate CFDT wants an extra 100 euros a month in take-home pay. What started as the student protests that started it all is now a rolling confrontation over wages, prices and public-service cuts, with the remnants of the yellow-vest movement — the force that shook Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in 2018 — marching alongside.
Saturday also showed the movement’s harder edge. At Place de la Concorde, a short walk from the Élysée Palace, police surrounded around 100 yellow-vest demonstrators who had gathered for a rival rally. Two of the movement’s coordinators, Benjamin Ball and spokeswoman Azelma Sigaux, were among those arrested in front of the National Assembly. In Lyon, where up to 3,300 people marched, 13 were arrested and residents were left clearing burned and overturned bins.
What happens now depends on Monday. Lecornu is scheduled to meet union leaders and employer representatives at Matignon, his office in Paris, to discuss wages and purchasing power — the first such talks since the protests began. The unions have called another march for next Saturday. The question is whether a negotiation can do what 70,000 police officers could not: give a movement that is losing numbers but not anger a reason to go home.
France votes for a new president in about five months, and the far right — which sees its best chance yet of winning — is watching every Saturday closely. The protests may be shrinking. The stakes are not.
