Photo: FreCha, via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
A week ago it was Black Thursday — November 5, when unions and students shut down much of France, with some 260 demonstrations and 70,000 police deployed. Here is where it stands tonight: the movement is stalling, and the numbers now say so plainly. What looked like the start of a long autumn is, a week on, looking thinner by the day.
The Saturday rounds have shrunk four straight weeks on the Interior Ministry’s own count — each Saturday smaller than the last — and Tuesday’s education day was a shadow of November 5. The ministry reports 1.6% of teachers on strike, against its own figure of about 15% on November 5, and 49 of some 3,700 high schools blockaded. In Paris, the prefecture counted 5,900 marchers; the organizers claimed 10,000. No looting was reported, and the marches were calm.
On Monday evening the union front cracked. The CGT, FSU, Solidaires and UNSA called a new joint day for Tuesday, November 17; the CFDT, CFTC and Force Ouvrière held back, to let wage talks run. The eight-union unity of Black Thursday is broken, at least for now. Students also walked out of the first Parcoursup reform committee on Monday.
The government’s one quantified offer so far is a rise in the minimum wage, the Smic, of 1.6% from December 1, to €1,502 net a month. Every major union has rejected it. It was the government’s only number on the table, and it did not move anyone.
The week’s one ugly incident was at Chelles, where a local elected official mediating at a school was hit in the chest with a bottle filled with gasoline. She has been named — Angela Pascoa Dos Santos — and an attempted-homicide investigation is open. President Macron condemned the attack in his first personal intervention of the movement and called for firm punishment. A school fire in Aix-en-Provence damaged 40 classrooms; no link to the movement has been established.
American cable covered Tuesday in an escalation register. One Fox segment spoke of thousands on the street while its own live shot showed normal traffic, and the same correspondent then noted that the day’s only march had passed off completely peacefully. The coverage is running ahead of the count. That is the gap this series watches: what the pictures say, against what the counts say.
The wave is wider than France, though its weight is not yet clear. Spain held its first general strike in 14 years today; every participation figure out so far is a union claim — the unions claim 90% in ports and auto plants, with full stoppages at VW Navarre and SEAT Barcelona — and no government or employer counter-figure has been published yet, so the strike’s real weight is not yet known. Italy’s CGIL ran a housing solidarity day today alongside it; no outcome had been reported as this was written.
This reads as a stall, not an ending — a movement pausing, its front split, its numbers down, with two live dates ahead: the Yellow Vests have called a fifth Saturday of action on November 14 that the main unions have not backed, and the partial union day on November 17. Neither date, on its own, will settle whether the movement revives or fades further. We will keep an eye on it. France chooses a president in 2027, and what this movement does to the ground between now and then will not stay inside France. And it is the kind of story American coverage mostly skips — which, around here, is reason enough.
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