Hundreds of thousands march in France to protest against government

For more on what's been happening, I'm joined on set now by Oliver Ferry from our International Affairs desk. So, Oliver, as we saw, it was relatively calm yesterday compared to a week ago. So why was it so much smoother this time? The police might say it's because they had a large presence there, 700,000, which was a lot, beefed up considerably since last weekend. The protesters themselves might say that this was just simply the real face of the protest, that the violence last week was an aberration. Now, it's fair to say that it's not the first protest where there have been clashes, but there was nothing on the scale of the mayhem that we saw last week. It also might have something to do with the fact that the route had been moved the day before to effectively the periphery of Paris, something which is fairly unprecedented in protests. The police had cited operational difficulties because of the terrorist attack in Trappes the previous day, but the authorities were probably a little bit more nervous about possible optics. It was due to proceed from Bastille in the east of the city to Place de la Nation, which is a fairly standard protest route. However, there are tens of thousands of Americans in the city this weekend for Sunday's NFL game at the Stade de France. many of those are staying in hotels around Bastille so it's quite possible that the government were a little bit nervous about American visitors a large number of them getting caught up in any potential uh violence that might have happened and of course that that would probably not play well internationally um of course the visitors would have been well aware of the protests taking place nonetheless because a lot of shops were closed and a lot of museums including the Louvre. Despite a massive police presence the various protests were not entirely without incident. There are reports this morning from the police that one shop was looted in the east of Paris and there were clashes at the end of that protest yesterday and also in a number of cities around the country as well. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters and there were couple of serious injuries, including in Toulouse, where a protester had fingers blown off. That's the third time it has happened during the protests in recent weeks. However, the protest in Paris was largely festive. And as you said earlier, there were multi-generations of Parisians taking part. Now, as we had heard some of these protesters, they say they're angry, they want to keep this up. But where does this leave all the protests now? They're certainly not going away. The government probably had hoped that the initial secondary school protests, which started over a month ago, might fizzle out with the midterm holidays, which we are currently in, and they have clearly not disappeared. Also, the CGT, the main trade union, has called for a general strike on November 5th. There are also now multiple grievances. Initially, the school protests were because of poor conditions in schools, lack of education funding. to that was added cost of living and now people are actually protesting against the policing of the protests themselves particularly angry over how things deteriorated last weekend people said that they were that peaceful protesters were tear gassed while the police were actually powerless to stop the more violent ones who went on a rampage in the streets around so i myself spoke to some people yesterday who said that that was their main reason for marching for the first time yesterday was simply out of anger at both the police handling and the government's response. Now, as I saw in Hong Kong in 2019, that actually anger at policing and an unresponsive government can further drive popular anger. So while the government might reasonably say that they haven't got an awful lot of room to maneuver with regards to beefing up education budgets, they probably need to get their messaging a little bit better and be a little bit more nimble in their response to this popular uprising. Now, Oliver, you know, the big concern here is the issue of this high cost of living and, you know, reduced public services, but the government doesn't have any money. So is there a solution on the horizon here? Well, something has to give. Most of the government spending on education is actually not really on schools itself, put on actual pensions, not simply for retired teachers, but also for retired civil servants who are working within the education system or have worked within the education system. Of course, if they try to touch those, that will be just another front that will be opened on there. So the government is in a tight position. They will say that they're not able to find money, but they will probably have to make some sort of a concession if if they are to actually get a way out of this and um you know we're dealing right now it's ahead of a presidential election so the parties are kind of pointing fingers at each other um do you think there's a point that there'll be a consensus or is one party really coming out on top because of these demonstrations um it seems to be that the far right national rally is going to benefit the most from this it casts itself as a party of law and order and it generally prefers to keep that uh to show that images of france in urban disarray are not the image that it wants to show to france and it will be quite difficult for parties in the center and the left to cast themselves against them Oliver thank you so much that's Oliver Ferry from our international affairs desk