Freedom to demonstrate: before Saturday, the State must ban little and protect a great deal

This Wednesday, 21 October, Sébastien Lecornu is receiving the five representative trade unions at Matignon, in the presence of the Interior Minister. On the agenda, according to AFP: freedom to demonstrate and the answers to be given to secondary school students. The meeting comes two days after an instruction from Laurent Nuñez to prefects that changes the situation for the day of mobilisation on Saturday 24 October. The right to march in the street, a pillar of our democratic life, finds itself at the centre of the game.

The facts

According to Le JDD, which consulted the document, a telegram dated Monday 19 October asks prefects to ban protest demonstrations planned for Saturday that could disturb public order. Franceinfo, which had access to the same memo, specifies that a ban should only be issued if dialogue with the organisers has failed to establish the necessary security conditions. The minister cites the national context and asks that local circumstances be taken into account.

The memo goes further. According to franceinfo, it recommends keeping authorised marches away from public buildings and shopping streets, strengthening intelligence to estimate the number of radical participants, and it provides for orders banning gatherings around the places hit last weekend. Partial curfews could be decided. Le JDD stresses that this is not a general ban on demonstrating, and that prefects must respect the legal requirements of necessity and proportionality.

The context explains this firmness. According to AFP, around 3,000 shops were attacked during the violence of 17 and 18 October, 123 people have been jailed and around fifty judicial investigations opened. Localised curfews are already in force in Lyon, in Paris around Place de la République and Les Halles, and in Marseille for minors. In Rennes, again according to AFP, around 400 people, mostly secondary school and university students, marched despite a prefectoral ban, without any notable incident.

The positions at stake

The government stands by its choice. Laurent Nuñez, quoted by Le JDD, believes that faced with such a level of violence, the State's response must be "extremely rapid and firm". Sébastien Lecornu acknowledged before the National Assembly that the arrangements on 17 October were too static, and promised a "massive" deployment for Saturday. He also says the curfews contributed to the calm of recent nights.

On the right, criticism focuses mainly on the slowness of the executive. According to Le JDD, Jordan Bardella denounced the government's "incompetence" on CNews. Among employers, the president of Medef, Patrick Martin, considers the State to have "failed" and asks it to compensate uninsured shopkeepers, AFP reports.

On the trade union side, mistrust prevails. The CFDT and the CGT regret that secondary school student organisations have not been invited to Matignon. Marylise Léon, general secretary of the CFDT, believes the executive is "paying in cash for ten years of verticality" and calls for real social answers, according to AFP. Sophie Binet, for the CGT, had warned as early as 5 October, according to Sud Radio, that violence "always harms mobilisations", while stating that she wanted to protect students' right to demonstrate.

Trust is all the more fragile because Mediapart reported, on 19 October, internal exchanges suggesting that instructions may have aimed to blame the violence on La France insoumise, which the Interior Ministry denies.

The analysis

Let us say it clearly: nothing justifies looting, and the State has a duty to protect shopkeepers, elected officials and public servants. A Gaullist does not compromise on the authority of the State. But the authority of the State is also the guarantee of public freedoms. The right to demonstrate is not an administrative tolerance; it is the collective expression of ideas that the Constitution protects.

The law sets the framework precisely. In 2019, the Constitutional Council struck down the individual administrative ban on demonstrating provided for by the so-called anti-rioter law, recalling that any infringement of this freedom must be "necessary, appropriate and proportionate". Conversely, the European Court of Human Rights upheld in 2024, in the case of Eckert v. France, the ban on a yellow vest demonstration, precisely because it was limited in space and time and responded to a serious risk of violence.

Everything will therefore depend on implementation. A targeted, reasoned ban, limited to a perimeter and a few hours, open to review by the urgent applications judge, can be defended. A national instruction applied extensively, which would turn every student march into a presumed threat, would be another matter. It would risk punishing the vast peaceful majority for the acts of a minority, and fuelling the anger it claims to soothe.

Finally, there is a political question. The movement was born, AFP recalls, from very concrete demands: absent teachers replaced, resources, renovated buildings. Responding only with law enforcement means treating the symptom and forgetting the cause. Receiving the unions is a good signal. Not listening to the students themselves is a bad one.

Conclusion

On Saturday, the Republic will be judged on its ability to do both: stop the rioters from acting and let young people march. A simple proposal could help: that every ban order be published, reasoned and accompanied by an alternative route, and that the government receive the secondary school student organisations without delay. Public order is better built with trust than with constraint alone.

Article written with the help of artificial intelligence.