Our correspondent in Paris, sept 18th, 2025

During last summer, a call to “block everything” on September 10th started to spread on French social media. Some people on TV warned that it might be a Russian destabilization operation. No unions were involved. Some libertarian and far right movements started to get onboard. Left organizations were a bit uneasy. A few weeks before the 10th, some unions encouraged members to join but no general call to strike was issued. All the main unions called instead for a strike and multiple demonstrations across the country one week later, on the 18th. The call to “block everything” was subject to interpretation. Some said people should stay home and refrain from buying anything that day. Others wanted participants to rush to logistical hubs to physically block economic activity. This mainly targeted transportation, such as crowding public bus depots and amazon warehouses to prevent vehicles from getting in or out.

The tenth was an interesting surprise on two levels. First, participants were able to clog roads, stall activities and even block some important economic points, without the explicit help of unions, even though their open and self-managed methods of decision left them very open to the scrutiny of the police. Posting on an open WhatsApp group the exact targets of the mobilization, with meeting points and hours is commendable if your goal is to save the already overworked French police from tedious work. Second point, some people feared a politically confusing movement, with crowds of far-right militants mixed with left wing elements, and the inevitable fighting that it could produce. Turns out only the left showed up, demonstrating that this political culture was the only one having the will and the means to offer a tangible expression of the popular discontent with the current political situation.

Being a good and disciplined union member, I patiently waited a week to go on strike and participate in a more habitual demonstration in the streets of Paris on the 18th. A few days before, the police reported that the “renseignements généraux”, a wing of the police specialized in political intel, expected a massive turn out. I live in what we call the banlieues, a very socially and ethnically diverse web of cities crowded around the walls of Paris, trying to suck as much riches as possible from the center of the former French imperium. Now, how do you get to the meeting point for the demonstration, when you live quite far outside of the city, when you have no car and all public transportation is shut down due to massive strikes? If, like me, you’re lucky and live five minutes away from one of the last industrial and communist led towns in the Paris area, union buses might be a solution. It’s simple, you just need to check a bunch of local union’s facebook pages, look for buses, then call a guy on his cell phone (turns out he was on vacation), then call the local union office to obtain an e-mail address to write to, in order to finally get a meeting point and an hour of departure. I don’t know if this is a strategy to deter police infiltration, but it sure is less accessible than a WhatsApp group.

I usually am the youngest and most bougie-looking rider on the bus rented by the union. The usual industrial workers in red union vests are here, loudly joking among themselves “oh, here come the hooligans, always the same old faces!”, catching up and sharing news from the shop. There are also younger faces, hip looking people with keffiyehs. Today, there are three buses full of us. We usually struggle to fill one. Waiting for the bus to leave, I spot posters on the street wall calling for last week’s “tout bloquer” event. Photos of famous French billionaires : “Don’t tax them. Take everything back from them” The local union leader, a north-african woman dressed in black with a long keffiyeh hanging from her neck, gives a little plastic box as a collection basket to pass around to share in the expenses. “Comrades! It’s for the local union, nothing mandatory”. Renting three buses and paying for three drivers must have represented a significant cost for the union. Somebody yells “Seatbelts!” and here we go. A guy blasts “On lâche rien” on his phone, a tired demonstration hymn that apparently some still enjoy listening to.

Arriving at the start of the demonstration, I met a colleague of mine who proposed to tag along with me. He just joined the union this morning. I told my New Personalist friends I would check out the meeting of the left wing catholics, so I did. Two dozen people were there. Participants in the relatively new Anastasis Collective were meeting with activists from older movements like Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, Chrétiens dans le Monde Rural and Action Catholique Ouvrière. We briefly talked with one of them. She’s preparing another mobilization in the east of France this weekend, to protest the nuclear waste disposal of Bure. Here’s another problem: the union comrade I had just met is not a Christian, and he doesn’t seem to care that much about those weirdos. The demonstration had already started to move and he wants to check out what was up, and to be honest I did too.

We walked up the procession, passing the moderate, orange vests of the CFDT blasting Francis Cabrel songs to reach the young, more radical Solidaires, DJs making the union and their sympathisers jump to tunes like “Taxer les Riches” and “Planète Brûlée”. Multiple minivans from my union, the CGT, advance slowly on the asphalt, back doors open to serve drinks. The police were right, a lot of people showed up. We quickly reach the “cortège de tête”, the head of the demonstration, where younger and slightly more radical demonstrators gather. A lot of Palestinian flags, students. I spot the Jewish anti-zionist group Tsedek! and Urgence Palestine, an organization the government wants to ban.

We’re on a boulevard. At every intersection, left and right, the streets are obstructed by walls of riot police. The government says they deployed 80.000. One cop for six or twelve demonstrators, depending on the numbers you choose to trust. Usually, they stand a few meters back, preventing the demonstration from spreading into multiple, uncontrollable sub groups. My comrade points to the next intersection; the cops are closer, just on the brink of the boulevard we’re walking on. Shouts erupt from the crowd “Police! Rapists! Mur-de-rers!” Some projectiles fly. Next intersection, same show. “Eve-ry-body hates the police!” Suddenly they burst into the boulevard, just in front of us. Some people run back, some yell “do not run!!!” so we try to walk back calmly, facing the cops. They are hitting everyone. People’s skulls bleed. Three rows of tightly pressed individuals, most of them scared, separate me from these violent men. I see one of them aiming at the crowd with a grenade thrower. He doesn’t fire. The heavy armoured cops suddenly go back to their colleagues in the side streets. That’s enough for my friend. He finds an open street and goes home. I find another and spend the rest of the demonstration with him. We walk next to burned bins and on broken glass, but nothing awful really. When we arrive at the end of the planned route, on the huge “Nation” square, I know I have to split before the police start hitting the crowd with batons and tear-glass grenades. It's become systematic. Plus, I have a bus waiting for me to take me home.

We wait for all the comrades to hop in. On the way back, the driver hired by the union asks one of us “was it a success?” The guy responds that a lot of people showed up, so yes. “But will it change anything?” The comrade: "I’m not sure, I think things need to get hyperviolent for anything to change". He tells about his dad, the way he always said “I’ll do that when I retire”. But when he reached retirement age, it turns out he couldn’t do any of the things he wanted to. He tells about all his colleagues who die a year after they retire. “I don’t know if it will change anything, but I tell myself, at least I would have tried. You have to play to win. What would really change things is if we could really block the country, nobody moves, nobody works. But hey, if you bus drivers are on strike, how will [one] go to the demo?”

Our correspondent in Paris, sept 18th, 2025