Emmanuel Macron has announced that demonstrations organised by individuals or groups without what he calls "legitimate authority" will be banned in the coming days. Protests organised by recognised bodies such as trade unions will be permitted but may have their routes altered. The measures follow some of France's worst street violence in years, with looting and arson on the fringes of cost-of-living protests last weekend. The framing is instructive. Macron attributed the worst violence to "political and seditious acts by ultra far-left groups who aimed to bring down the republic" — language that transforms economic grievance into a security threat. This allows the state to invoke emergency-style powers without formally declaring a state of emergency, sidestepping the political cost of that declaration while achieving much of its effect. The numbers tell a story of rapid judicial escalation: 2,500 arrests since last weekend, 174 remanded in custody, more than 900 prosecuted, and two arrests for the arson at Limoges town hall. Blanket protest bans are already in effect for Saturday in Lyon, Marseille, Nice, and Toulon. In Paris, one march from the Place de la Bastille was authorised but confined to the east; a separate student and gilets jaunes march was denied entirely. The distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" protesters is doing enormous political work. Trade unions — institutional, legible, negotiable — are tolerated. Student unions and gilets jaunes — diffuse, harder to co-opt, and historically effective at embarrassing French governments — are not. This is not a neutral public-safety measure; it is a filter that privileges organised labour over grassroots movements, precisely because the latter are harder to control. The protests themselves began as a narrow school-conditions grievance in Créteil and metastasised into a broader cost-of-living movement. That trajectory — local complaint becoming national rage — is a pattern French governments have failed to interrupt repeatedly. The gilets jaunes movement of 2018-2019 followed the same escalation curve, and the state's inability to address root causes then is a direct ancestor of the anger now. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu's meetings with party leaders and city mayors are the conventional pressure-release valve: consultative theatre designed to signal that the political class is listening. Meanwhile, businesses in central Paris are boarding up windows and hiring private security — the market's verdict on whether the political class's response will work. The timing matters. Presidential elections are six months away. Macron cannot run again, but the perceived success or failure of his response will shape the field. A heavy-handed crackdown that suppresses protests without addressing costs risks feeding the very populist movements — left and right — that thrive on the narrative of an out-of-touch elite. The 20-year question is whether France's model of selective protest tolerance, which has defined its social contract since 1968, can survive repeated cycles of economic stress and state overreach.
