France now counts 1,800 arrests from Saturday’s marches, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Sunday, more than four times the 400 that first circulated when the marches ended. Yesterday’s headline number is already out of date, and the bill is only starting to arrive.
Start with the arithmetic nobody has done. Nuñez’s ministry counted 550,000 marchers at 110 demonstrations. Divide 1,800 arrests into that and you get roughly one arrest for every 300 people on the street. Saturday was overwhelmingly peaceful, and the government’s own figures say so. The damage came from a small fraction of a very large crowd.
That fraction was expensive. The Retail and Trade Federation says about 1,500 businesses were damaged, with losses in the hundreds of millions of euros, and shops were looted in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nice and Strasbourg. In Limoges, a prefect says a “wild horde” set the 19th-century town hall alight on purpose. Lyon lost a tourist office to fire. About 500 police, firefighters and paramedics were hurt, Nuñez said, and a 17-year-old in Saint-Étienne lost his right hand to a crowd-control grenade.
Two numbers still do not agree. Organizers, including the CGT union, said 800,000 people marched, which is 250,000 more than the ministry allowed. And Paris police called 855 arrests a record, while other officials spoke of 557 people in custody. Arrests and custody are different counts, and nobody has explained the gap in public.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu chairs a crisis meeting of ministers on Monday morning. Insurance and aid for shopkeepers are on the agenda, along with prosecutions. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin wants an “extremely firm” response, including requests to hold suspects before trial. The government has ruled out a state of emergency.
Here is what we think matters. The fight over whether it was 550,000 or 800,000 people is a distraction from the real test. This movement began with high schoolers blockading classes over teacher shortages and crumbling buildings, and earlier tallies showed most of those prosecuted were minors. If Darmanin’s detention push sweeps up teenagers while the people who burned Limoges stay unidentified, the government will have punished the protest and missed the arson.
Monday’s meeting will say which one it chose.