A movement that started in schools
For the third Saturday in a row, crowds filled streets across France on 31 October, with high school and university students marching alongside labour unions and supporters of the Yellow Vest movement. The marches began in the morning and stayed peaceful in most cities for hours. Turnout was hard to pin down: organisers put the national figure in the hundreds of thousands, while the interior ministry counted a lower number and said the situation was "generally calm" through the afternoon.
The grievances are broad and overlapping. Students point to crowded classrooms, teacher shortages and ageing buildings. Unions point to pay that has not kept pace with prices. Yellow Vest veterans return to fuel costs and what they call a tax system that hits working households hardest.
Tear gas in Paris and Lyon
By evening the pattern of previous weekends returned. Police fired tear gas in Paris and Lyon. On the edge of the capital, groups of masked people dressed in black used hammers to pry up paving stones and throw them at officers, according to AFP, and at least one incendiary device was thrown at security forces who answered with baton charges. The interior ministry said at least 290 people had been arrested nationwide, well below the more than 1,000 detained during the first wave on 17 October, when shops were looted and vehicles burned.
Halloween added an unusual note. In eastern Paris several thousand marchers came in costume, from Spider-Man to Frankenstein, carrying placards that mixed jokes with anger. One read that the future looked bleak without any need for tear gas.
A political test before 2027
The unrest lands six months before a presidential election that Emmanuel Macron cannot contest after two terms. Candidates on the left are competing to speak for the movement, while the government argues that order has to come first. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez has defended the policing strategy while acknowledging that earlier weekends slipped out of control. For now the protests have no single leadership and no agreed list of demands, which makes them hard to negotiate with and hard to end.