France put 70,000 police officers and gendarmes on the streets on Saturday, 10,000 more than the week before, and still arrested nearly 1,000 people. The numbers describe a security operation that was larger, better prepared and still unable to prevent a second weekend of clashes, and they raise a question the government has not yet answered: how many officers does it take to police a protest movement this broad?
The deployment followed an admission that authorities had underestimated the unrest on October 17, when largely peaceful protests were later marred by widespread looting and vandalism, thousands of businesses damaged, and more than 2,000 people taken into custody. This time, the state arrived early and in force, with checks across the country before the marches even began.
Anticipation, and its limits
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the violence was less intense than a week ago. “What changed was anticipation,” he told reporters. In Paris, police conducted more than 3,000 checks and made 65 arrests earlier in the day, before the main demonstration of at least 110,000 people on the capital’s southeastern fringes.
But anticipation has limits. After the main rally ended, riot police fired tear gas and water cannon at around 500 hooded youths in Paris. In Marseille, demonstrators fired mortar fireworks towards officers, set fire to rubbish bins to block roads, and threw rocks and bottles, while police said several stores, including two jewellery shops, were ransacked. Clashes also flared in Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Lille, Rennes, Nantes and Toulouse.
Counting the cost
As Reuters reported, the Interior Ministry counted 410,000 protesters nationwide, while unions put the figure at twice that number. Nunez said high risk groups broke away from almost every march to commit violence, accusing far left activists and criminal gangs of fomenting trouble.
A deployment of 70,000 officers is itself a statement: the state can secure the streets, but only by turning a protest weekend into a military scale operation. That is expensive, exhausting and politically costly, and it does not address the grievances over living costs, fuel prices and public services that brought hundreds of thousands out in the first place. More officers may contain the next weekend. They will not end the movement.
