Two days before a new day of protests, Emmanuel Macron is bringing intelligence services together at the Élysée after the 17 October security failure. In the afternoon, political parties and the mayors of major cities will be received at Matignon.
Crisis meetings are multiplying at the highest level of the state this Thursday, two days ahead of a feared "Act II" of the social mobilisation, after the violence and looting committed on the margins of demonstrations against the high cost of living last weekend in France.
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With several city centres under curfew for the third night in a row and new gatherings already banned today, Emmanuel Macron is this morning chairing a security council bringing together the prime minister, the relevant ministers and "all the intelligence services".
Scheduled for 10 a.m., the meeting is intended to take stock of the "intelligence, anticipation and security arrangements" for the coming weeks, but also to review the "failures that led to last weekend's events", according to the Elysée.
Emmanuel Macron will speak at the end of the council.
The French authorities have acknowledged a failure of the intelligence services, which largely underestimated the scale of the 17 October mobilisation. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had expected to see around 200,000 people in the streets, compared with 550,000 to 800,000 participants counted. Nearly 60,000 members of the security forces were deployed across the country on Saturday, without managing to prevent the acts of vandalism committed on the fringes of the marches, images of which travelled around the world.
The security arrangements planned for the new mobilisation on Saturday 24 October will be reinforced by the presence of soldiers from the Sentinelle force and elite units of the police and gendarmerie, such as RAID, GIGN and the BRI.
Junior interior minister Jean-Didier Berger announced on BFMTV a "20%" increase in law enforcement numbers compared with 17 October.
Matignon to meet parties, with several heavyweights staying away
In the afternoon, consultations will continue at Matignon. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu will receive representatives of the political forces present in parliament, notably to discuss a possible "change" in the doctrine of public-order policing.
"Together with the interior minister, I want to talk to them about the police. We are told that the police kill or the police injure. And for the past two days we have been hearing: 'What are the police doing?' It is a very French kind of politico-media schizophrenia", he wrote in a letter sent to political parties and cited by several media outlets.
Security at presidential campaign rallies is also expected to be on the agenda for this meeting.
In a sign of mistrust towards the executive, several candidates in the 2027 presidential election will give the meeting a miss: Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally, as well as former prime minister Édouard Philippe, will be absent.
By contrast, Green party leader Marine Tondelier, Socialist primary winner Raphaël Glucksmann and the Republicans' president, Bruno Retailleau, have confirmed they will attend.
LFI vows to "wreck" the meeting
La France insoumise and the government have been trading barbs since the violence on 17 October, each blaming the other for the chaos. The government accuses the radical left movement of "fanning the flames" of the anger expressed in the streets, while LFI denounces the authorities' strategy of "letting things rot", accusing them of failing to respond politically to demands it considers legitimate, particularly those of secondary school students.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon will be represented at Matignon by LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard. But on Tuesday, speaking to supporters in response to the prime minister's letter, the movement's leader set the tone: "We're going to go, we're going to wreck your meeting!"
The LFI founder was responding in particular to the passage in which Sébastien Lecornu states that "no disagreement, no anger, no political ambition can justify resorting to violence".
"Are you going to make us sign a certificate? Is that what you want? Do you really think we are going to do that? Of course not!" retorted Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
A few hours before the meeting, Manuel Bompard wrote that he would go to Matignon to ask for "apologies", "explanations" and "political answers to the mobilisation of the French people".
Mayors of Paris, Lyon and Marseille demand answers from the state
The consultations will not be limited to the parties. The mayors of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, three major cities particularly affected by last weekend's violence, will also be received.
The Green mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, is going there "with the aim of obtaining explanations about the chain of events that led the state to fail to anticipate Saturday's events properly", his team told Euronews.
At the start of the week, the three mayors, Grégory Doucet, Emmanuel Grégoire and Benoît Payan, had already complained, in a joint op-ed published in Libération, of the "feeling that whole swathes" of their cities, although "used" to popular expression, had been "left without protection".
The three left-wing mayors called for the creation of an "independent commission on the public-order strategy deployed that day", as well as the establishment of an "exceptional national solidarity fund" to finance repairs to the damage.