Two Saturdays in a row, the Paris police counted the same crowd: 110,000 marchers. Franceinfo noticed that the figure was identical to the one for 17 October. Nationally the interior ministry counted fewer, 410,000 against 550,000 a week earlier; the CGT union claimed about 800,000 both times.
The crowds were comparable. What happened around them was not.
On 17 October, cost-of-living marches across France ended in looting in Paris, Rouen, Nantes, Toulouse and Marseille, and Limoges town hall was set on fire. Nearly a thousand police and gendarmes were injured, by the interior ministry's own count. This Saturday, by 1pm, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez could report 135 arrests and, in his words, "no major incident". Most of those arrests, he said, came from checks on people heading for the marches. Officers had seized slingshots, steel balls, fireworks and, at one point, a katana.
Similar crowd. Different state. That is the whole story of the day, and it should embarrass the government more than it reassures anyone.
Order is a choice
What changed was not the public. It was the plan. France put 70,000 police and gendarmes on the streets, 10,000 more than a week earlier, Politico reports. In the Paris region alone, Nuñez said, there were more than 1,000 checks. People with bags full of projectiles were stopped before they reached the crowd. The union march itself was allowed to walk, on a route pushed out to the edge of the city, from Porte d'Italie to Porte de Vincennes.
It was not a peaceful day everywhere, and pretending otherwise would be the government's spin, not ours. As the marches broke up, water cannon and tear gas were used at Porte de Vincennes. Riot police charged in Bordeaux after stones were thrown, 20 Minutes reports, a shop was looted in Nantes and five people were arrested, and a protester in Toulouse suffered a serious hand injury, which the authorities say will be investigated. But by early evening, the scenes that defined last week, burning public buildings and gutted shopping streets, had not come back.
So the uncomfortable question is not why Saturday worked. It is why the previous Saturday did not. Nothing about this weekend's operation required a new law, a new treaty or a new budget. It required a minister who decided, in advance, that looting would not be tolerated.
And where it did not work
The day also showed what does not work. The authorities banned marches across large parts of several city centres, and in Lyon at least, the ban did the opposite of what it promised.
Lyon banned demonstrations in large parts of its centre. About 10,000 people marched anyway, in several wildcat processions with no organiser, no route and no stewards, franceinfo reports, and the police spent the afternoon dispersing them with tear gas. In Limoges, a court threw out the prefect's ban on the grounds that there was no specific evidence of uncontrollable disorder. Within hours, the prefect issued a new order banning gatherings of more than 20 people across a large part of the city.
That is not law and order. It is a cat-and-mouse game with the administrative courts. A conservative should want the state to come down hard on people carrying slingshots, and to leave a union march with its own stewards alone. Saturday proved the first approach works. Lyon proved the second, banning everyone, simply moves the trouble to streets with nobody in charge.
The man who "avenged the shopkeepers"
Here is why last week's failure matters more than a few broken windows.
On Friday, a man drove through Trappes and La Verrière, west of Paris, firing a wartime Sten submachine gun from his car. A 26-year-old man, Pengo Bossio Wangi, an amateur MMA fighter, is dead. A 12-year-old girl is still in a critical condition, the anti-terror prosecutor said on Saturday. When he was arrested, the suspect, Kévin T., 39, boasted that he had "avenged the shopkeepers" looted on 17 October by going after "Blacks and Arabs", according to Le Monde, as relayed by AFP and the Belgian broadcaster RTBF. A copy of Mein Kampf was found in his flat, Le Monde and Le Parisien report. He has not been charged yet. His time in police custody has been extended.
Read that again. A man with a Nazi book and a submachine gun appointed himself the defender of France's shopkeepers. Nobody but the gunman is responsible for what he did. And he avenged nobody. The shopkeepers of Paris and Limoges did not ask a stranger to shoot a child in a headscarf in Trappes. They asked their government to protect their shops, and for one Saturday it did not.
This is the real reason order is not a right-wing luxury. When the state leaves a vacuum, the worst man in the area will claim to fill it. Every Saturday the police lose control is a Saturday that hands a story to people like him. Every Saturday they keep it takes that story away.
The crowd in Orléans, and the vote inside
Meanwhile, about 110 kilometres south of Paris, two crowds told the story of next spring's election.
Outside, between 13,000 people (police figure) and 26,000 (organisers) marched against Marine Le Pen's National Rally, which was holding its party congress in Orléans. The march was calm. The city's centre-right mayor, Serge Grouard, even praised the CGT union's stewarding. Inside, Jordan Bardella was re-elected party president, unopposed, with 98.98 percent: 75,497 member votes, France 24 reports, with about three times as many members voting as four years ago. Le Pen formally launches her campaign on Sunday. A left-wing counter-protest planned for that day has been banned.
Polls already make Le Pen the frontrunner, and DW notes they suggest the unrest may have helped her. But Trappes changes what her campaign has to prove. She has said justice must be "implacable" and condemned the "abject motive of racism", Le Dauphiné Libéré reports. Good. Now she has to say the harder sentence from that stage in Orléans: the man who shot a 12-year-old girl in the name of looted shopkeepers is not on our side, and never will be.
The family of the young man who died has asked investigators, through its lawyer, to trace the suspect's radicalisation, and pointed to "great replacement" ideas spreading in media and politics, "including during the current election campaign". That accusation will follow the RN all the way to April. The best answer is not outrage. It is a party that can promise order without anyone, ever, hearing it as permission.
Next Saturday
None of this ends tonight. The Yellow Vests have called for new protests on 31 October, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, marching in Paris, warned that Macron "is going to understand that this is going to repeat itself every week", the Guardian reports. In Madrid on Saturday, pensioners marched for their pensions. In Milan, 500 extra soldiers were patrolling the streets. In Tirana, police fired rubber bullets on the 12th day of protests. The anger is European. The capacity to keep a street calm is not. It belongs to national governments, and Brussels has no police to send.
France learned this week that it can hold its streets when it chooses to. The price of the Saturday it did not choose was not counted in shop windows. It is a 12-year-old girl in a hospital bed.
Update, 25 October 2026, 00:25: The evening was rougher than the afternoon. Late on Saturday, barricades were set alight in Marseille, boards were torn off a shop in Bordeaux to build another, and police used tear gas and water cannon in Paris and Lyon. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said nearly 1,000 people had been arrested, a number he expected to rise, that "around 500 individuals identified as rioters" had gathered at the back of the Paris march, and that two people were seriously injured, in Toulouse and Clermont-Ferrand, the BBC reports. Clashes were also reported in Brussels. Officials still say there was no repeat of last weekend's looting. The point stands, with a harder edge: order held because the state arrested people before and after the march, not because the anger had gone.