France answers a riot with a list of meetings, and that is not a joke

Saturday was one of the most violent days of unrest France has seen in years. The interior ministry counted nearly 2,400 arrests and almost 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven seriously; in Paris alone police reported a record 855 arrests¹. Town halls were stormed in Limoges, where the 19th-century building burned, in Marseille and in Lille, and traders’ unions said more than 1,500 shops and businesses had been ransacked¹.

On Sunday at 8pm Emmanuel Macron addressed the country². He drew a hard line between the “plusieurs centaines de milliers”, several hundred thousand people, who marched with legitimate worries about the cost of living, fuel prices and schools, and those who “destroy, ransack and loot”^1,2. Then he set out a method in three parts². Prefects, with mayors, may ban certain gatherings. Parties and unions are asked to condemn violence without ambiguity. And this week the prime minister will bring pupils, students, teachers, unions, employers, local authorities and parliamentarians to one table to work on concrete proposals. The education ministry’s consultation platform has collected more than 100,000 contributions². Macron also said he would travel to the Gulf states to secure fuel and gas supplies².

Cynics will call a meeting a non-answer. The small print says otherwise. The government has already promised 3,000 more substitute teachers, a place for students in school decision-making, and has scrapped planned increases in some university registration fees³. That is the protesters’ original complaint, missing teachers and crumbling classrooms, answered in payroll lines rather than adjectives. The school protests began in late September, a week into the school year³, and they asked for staff, not slogans.

The harder question is the state’s own competence. The mayor of Limoges said his municipal police ran out of ammunition at about 3.30pm and called it “a colossal failure of the state”; politicians on the left and the right called for the interior minister’s resignation¹. Macron asked the government to draw every lesson on intelligence and anticipation and promised full transparency². That is a promise with a deliverable, an after-action report, and it should be held to one.

The constructive part is the calendar. France votes for a new president in April 2027³, and Macron’s own framing on Sunday was that the argument belongs in public meetings, newspapers and peaceful rallies, not in the street². Institutions that answer peaceful demands with budget lines and violent ones with courts are doing their job, slowly and without applause. This week’s test is simple: does the round table produce a number, with a date attached?