On October 17, 800,000 people took to the streets in every cities across France, making it the largest day of mobilization since the end of the 2023 movement against pension reform. This is far fewer than the latter, which had the support of all the unions and drew as many as 3,500,000 people, but far more than the uprising in working-class suburbs in response to the murder of the young Nahel, that same year, which had drawn between 50,000 and 100,000 people. However, it was not the size of the October 17 mobilization that made it the most significant, but its combativeness. October 17 was the most violent day since the historic “Act III” of the Yellow Vests movement on December 1, 2018, during which the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was stormed, among other things.
A majority of the protesters were under 25, and the mobilizations were concentrated mainly in urban centers, which places this movement more in the continuation of the high school student movement than in that of the Yellow Vests, from which it drew inspiration. Young people took advantage of a month of blockades and demonstrations to learn how to confront the police, when and where to retreat, and how to equip themselves. All the marches were marked by joyful excitement and great solidarity. Compared to the Yellow Vests movement, violence was much more widespread, but far less directly directed against the state. In some cities, such as Lyon, the entire mobilization was more or less unauthorized, and the majority of demonstrators supported violent actions through their presence or participated in them themselves. That said, the clashes with the police—vastly overwhelmed in almost every city, including Paris—were not very offensive. The bourgeois law enforcement forces were generally secondary targets, against whom no major open “battles” were waged (as had been the case in 2023 or 2018), but only opportunistic “skirmishes.” However, all the violence that was not directed against the police was directed at institutions of the bourgeois Republic and businesses. Major sports, electronics (Boulanger, Apple Store, etc.), and luxury retail stores were stormed and looted everywhere. The Limoges City Hall and the Lyon Tourist Office were set on fire. The city halls in Marseille, Angers and Lille, and the official residence of the Gironde prefect in Bordeaux were ransacked.
Police forces were stretched to the limit across the 110 cities where the movement took place; in every one of them, the number of participants had been underestimated by the authorities, who had not anticipated that they would be more than 100,000 throughout France. Blockades began early in the morning, and looting escalated throughout the day, continuing well into the night. The police did not regain control of the city centers until the early hours of October 18. Police unions complain of being under-equipped and of having occasionally run out of ammunition (tear gas, rubber bullets, grenades) while in action. The possibility that the under-deployment of police forces was a political calculation on the part of the government cannot be ruled out.
We are not afraid to say that October 17 was, for a big part, a day of urban riots; riots have always been and will always be part of the proletariat’s arsenal of struggle, and the proletariat needs to educate itself in them. This form of proletarian struggle teaches the proletariat things that other more legal and peaceful forms of struggle, such as strikes, will never teach. Compared to the latter, riots have the great virtue of distinguishing between those who follow the proletariat in all its struggles, or only in a limited part of them; those who encourage it to break free from bourgeois methods and structures of struggle (however important and necessary they may be), or to remain within them. Communists are not accountable to the petty-bourgeois shopkeepers who lament their ruin, but to the masses of young male and female workers who are revolted by their conditions.
This new demonstration of the anger and courage of the masses gives us great hope for the coming years and decades of struggle of the proletariat and the people, in France! However, as we noted recently regarding the high school student movement, the movement remains overwhelmingly dominated by reformist politics, even in its most advanced fringes. On the positive side, the fascists were unable to find any place in this movement; on the negative side, the parliamentary party La France insoumise (LFI) was able to easily and quickly take a large place within it. Mélenchon [the founder, leader and candidate of the LFI party for the next presidential elections] has succeeded in convincing young people that making a revolution and voting for him in 2027 [in the next presidential elections] are one and the same. Returning to the comparison with the Yellow Vests movement, we must note that “revolutionary” (democratic) politics only began to develop from its most advanced fringes after several months of struggle and raising consciousness on the roundabouts [where the Yellow Vests spontaneously gathered to protest and block roads accross the country] and in the general assemblies. We hope that October 17 is only the beginning of a movement that will undergo a similar process of maturation.
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