About 320,000 people marched across France on Saturday, October 31, against the high cost of living and President Emmanuel Macron's government — some 70,000 of them in Paris alone — in the third wave of a citizen mobilisation that has grown out of the Gilets Jaunes movement and now draws in a younger generation of protesters.
In Paris the day ended in confrontation. As the march dispersed at Porte de Charenton, riot police charged small groups of protesters, and officers fired tear gas in Lyon and Toulouse as clashes broke out there too. Police had braced for more trouble on Halloween night, with the marches ending after dark in several cities.
After dark the protests did not fully go home: crowds marched through Paris at night in a wildcat procession, singing the Marseillaise. The movement calls itself "Acte 3" — a third act of the cost-of-living revolt that first put the Gilets Jaunes on France's roads — and its single demand runs through every banner: life has become too expensive.
For households, in France as in America, the politics is the prices: rent, fuel and the weekly shop have outrun pay, and the street is where that pressure lands when people feel the government is not answering it. Macron's government now faces a movement that has already outlasted one weekend — Saturday was its third national act, and its organisers say the cost of living will keep it marching.
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