On Saturday, 24 October, France’s Ministry of the Interior counted again. It reported 410,000 people marching across the country, 110,000 of them in Paris. Priyanka Shankar, writing for Al Jazeera, described a government that still has no answer to a movement started by teenagers.

The two sides counted differently, as they always do. The CGT union, which helped organise some of the marches, put the national figure at nearly 800,000, PBS NewsHour reported. The organisers said 250,000 marched in Paris. By the ministry’s own figures turnout was lower than the week before, when it had counted 550,000. In the capital, though, the number held steady, and the authorities kept the march to the city’s southeastern edge, well away from the centre.

The state sent about 70,000 police officers onto the streets, according to the ministry, in an operation that Al Jazeera’s earlier coverage described as a day of heightened security. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the Paris march “took place peacefully, like most protest marches across the entire country.” He also said police had faced an “extremely high level of violence,” with “projectiles constantly being thrown and mortar fireworks fired.” Nearly 1,000 people were detained, and the government still said the day had gone well. A regime that measures success this way has already decided what success means.

The classroom

It started small, in mid-September, with lycée pupils blockading their own schools. Their complaints were concrete: classes of 32 to 35 pupils, absent teachers who are never replaced, buildings falling apart. Within weeks the protests had more than doubled in size by the government’s own count. One placard read: “We have a future to build, not to endure.”

Amine Snoussi, a journalist at Le Media TV and a former parliamentary assistant, spoke of students in “cold, dirty buildings, some of them infested with rats,” while public money “keeps flowing to private schools. That’s what lit the fuse.”

Teachers joined over pay. The OECD’s Education at a Glance 2026 puts a French teacher’s gross salary at €41,968 a year, against €69,453 in Germany. Then came the trade unions and the civil servants. Their grievance is the proposed €54bn package of cuts and tax measures in the 2027 budget, which includes a freeze on civil servants’ salaries. All this is happening as poverty stands at a multidecade high and the US-Israel war on Iran pushes living costs higher still. The students themselves want an extra 200 euros a month in grants and a rent freeze in public student housing.

The palace

The government’s first answers were curfews and police. Emmanuel Macron blamed ultra-left groups for trying to “bring down the Republic.” Only on Friday did he receive the students’ representatives, for the first time since the blockades began, and they left promising to keep marching until the government acted. On Monday in Marseille, Macron said he had asked the government to address “the legitimate demands at the root of this protest movement.” Changes to Parcoursup, the university admissions platform students consider unfair, are reportedly coming.

On 7 October Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu had conceded that “the anger among young people didn’t come out of nowhere,” and he promised a plan by the end of October. Today is 27 October, and the deadline is four days away.

The arithmetic

The trouble is the money. National debt stands at about €3.6tn, or 119 percent of GDP. The 2026 deficit is forecast at 5.4 percent of GDP, while the EU average is just over 3 percent. The economist Lucas Chancel has found that higher-education funding per student, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 20 percent since 2017. The young are being asked to pay off a debt run up while their own share was being cut.

Thomas Piketty puts it another way. Private wealth, he notes, has grown from 300 percent to 600 percent of GDP: “France has never been richer. The problem to solve is simply one of distribution.” A January 2026 review by the OFCE found that people aged 60 and over, a quarter of the population, hold 60 percent of the country’s wealth. A government report seen by Reuters says that in some ministries nearly a third of the budget goes on civil servants’ pensions.

Macron has history here. He cut the wealth tax, and his fuel tax set off the Yellow Vests, a movement over inequality and public services that lasted nearly two years and left many of its demands unmet. In 2017 he told The New York Times: “I don’t believe in this French jealousy which says, ‘There are rich people; let’s tax them…’” Snoussi said: “Macron is called the rich people’s president for a reason.”

Not everyone accepts the redistribution argument. Antonio Fatas of INSEAD argues that France already redistributes about as much as its European neighbours, and that the deeper illness is years of weak growth. State spending is about 57 percent of GDP, 14 percent of it on pensions. “One has to be careful about the limitations of these apparent solutions,” he warns, and “there is little room to just spend the way out of this.” He blames a political class that cannot agree on reform.

So a state that already spends more than half of national output tells its children it cannot afford their classrooms. A reflection, not a fact: governments usually find money for police before they find it for teachers, because police are needed today and pupils only matter later. The movement has called another march for next Saturday. Snoussi has wondered aloud whether Macron wants things to get worse so the movement can be repressed. His summary of what the government faces is short: “invest, or step aside.”