France's Saturday Protests Come With 70,000 Police and a Legal Filter
France is on high alert ahead of Saturday's nationwide protests, a week after what the BBC calls some of the country's worst unrest in decades.
The interior ministry says it will deploy 70,000 police officers, after opposition parties accused the government of failing to foresee the scale of the unrest on 17 October.
Macron decreed earlier this week that only demonstrations organised by recognised trade unions would be permitted on Saturday; Lyon, Nice and Montpellier have gone further by announcing blanket bans on gatherings.
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A rule that only recognised unions may demonstrate is a curious kind of permission: it does not ban protest so much as decide which protest gets to count as legitimate.
The organisers hardly seem deterred: hundreds of large and small demonstrations are planned across France. With cities setting different rules, the result looks less like a clean ban than a patchwork.