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Hundreds of thousands of people marched across France on Saturday 24 October 2026 in the latest weekend of nationwide protests, some of which turned violent in several cities. The Interior Ministry counted 410,000 participants nationwide. The CGT union said 800,000 people took part. Reuters carried the government and police figures, and the Rio Times, which cited Franceinfo and Interior Ministry data, reported the same official count.
In Paris, police counted about 110,000 marchers, who moved peacefully between the Porte d’Italie and the Porte de Vincennes. The CGT put the Paris turnout at 250,000. Reuters reported that the unrest began with small student demonstrations in suburban Paris the previous month over school conditions. It then grew into a broader protest against the economy, with demonstrators denouncing the cost of living and rising inequality.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told reporters that police had arrested 135 people nationwide by early afternoon. He said many of those arrests followed pre-emptive searches that found fireworks, ball bearings and other items that could be used as weapons. The Rio Times said the figure was a midday count rather than a final tally, and that no final national figures for arrests, injuries or property damage had been published when it was written.
Violence was sporadic but concentrated in some places. Reuters described clashes that flared as hundreds of thousands marched. The Rio Times reported that police counted more than 500 rioters at the Cours de Vincennes in Paris. Neither report gives a figure for injuries.
The government response has been larger than the one a week earlier. Nuñez said authorities had deployed 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, which is 10,000 more than the week before, after conceding that they had underestimated the unrest. He said, “We have to be ultra, ultra responsive,” and accused far-left activists and criminal gangs of trying to stir up violence.
The official turnout figure is lower than an earlier one. The Rio Times reported that the Interior Ministry had counted 550,000 people on 17 October. The reports reviewed do not explain the difference between the two counts, and they do not say whether the ministry’s method changed between the weekends.
Why it matters: the protests have moved beyond students and into a broader challenge over living costs and inequality. The size of the police deployment, and the government’s own admission that it had underestimated the unrest, suggest the security response will shape how any further protests unfold. Those developments also make the official and union figures more important as a measure of public support.
Several things remain unknown. No final arrest count, injury total or damage estimate was available in the reports reviewed. The union and government figures differ by roughly a factor of two, and neither has been independently verified. The reports do not say whether further marches are planned, or what demands, if any, the unions will put to the government next.
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