More than half a million French people take to the streets on the day of the convergence of social mobilizations

More than 600,000 protesters (1.6 million, according to the unions) took to the streets of the main French cities this Thursday in the largest social mobilization since the student protests began a month ago. November 5 was marked as "convergence" day, with marches and strikes called by the five main unions, protesting the high cost of living and the protection of public services.

The day of mobilizations and strikes in defense of purchasing power and public services ended, so far, with 448 arrests, 53 police officers injured and a slight downward revision of participation, from 600,000 to 575,000 protesters, reported the Ministry of the Interior.

The day started with the fire caused by a fireworks mortar at the Marie-Louis-Dissard institute in Toulouse, which had to be evacuated by firefighters. In another incident parallel to the protests, a 15-year-old student was stabbed at the gates of the Denis-Papin high school in La Courneuve, apparently due to an argument with another young man about the scope of the blockade.

"No to violence, no to vandalism," could be read in one of the first marches held in Nantes, in front of the walls of the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany, where some three thousand protesters gathered at noon. In Paris, the demonstration started again in the early afternoon under the emblematic statue of Marianne in the Place de la République, with beacons and barriers along the Boulevard Voltaire and an impressive deployment of riot police in the Place de la Nation, where scenes of high tension occurred in the late afternoon.

"This is the fifth time I have gone out on the streets in three weeks and I will continue going out as many times as necessary," lamented Agnes Varenne, a high school teacher in Saint-Ouen, who joined the 5-N strike in the Place de la République. "The young people took the first step with their legitimate demands for the precariousness of public education and now we are all behind. We come prepared because we know what is going to happen: we are not afraid of police repression."

At his side, Gilbert Durand, a law student at Panthéon Assas University, waved a cardboard banner that read "Gasse the rapists, not the students"... "This is the point we have reached: they have turned the right to demonstrate into a high-risk sport. If you don't come with your gas mask you run the risk of returning home with red eyes and burning lungs. And that's if a grenade doesn't explode and rip off your hand."

The unions denounced the obstructionist maneuvers of the Prefecture of Paris, which prohibited the march in the direction of the Place de la Concorde for security reasons and decided to divert it towards the Place de la Nation on the outskirts. "The behavior of the Police has been shameful," denounced the general secretary of the CGT union Sophie Binet. "They cancel at the last minute a route that had been approved, as has happened in twenty cities."

"We live in an extremely serious moment with a very dangerous authoritarian drift on the part of this Government that does not contribute to creating a safe environment in the demonstrations," lamented Sophia Binet, who predicted "tough confrontations" in the next phase of the protests, which will continue on Saturday with an "unauthorized" march of the yellow vests in the Place de la Concorde.

Unions estimated that the Paris march drew up to 300,000 protesters. Among them, the presidential candidate of the moderate left Raphaël Glucksmann, booed by some of the protesters with cries of "We all hate the Socialist Party." Glucksmann ended up abandoning the march, intimidated by supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise, which has capitalized on social protests and reinforced its second place in the polls, behind the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.