Photo: FreCha, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nearly 1,000 people were arrested across France on Saturday as mass protests over the cost of living swept the country for a second time in just over a week, with police firing tear gas in Paris and several other major cities. The demonstrations on Saturday, October 24, 2026, drew enormous crowds, though officials and organizers offered sharply different estimates of their size.
The Interior Ministry said about 410,000 people took part nationwide. The CGT union, one of the organizers, put the figure at nearly 800,000 — almost double the official count. The gap was just as wide in the capital: the ministry counted 110,000 demonstrators in Paris, while the CGT claimed 250,000 marched there. Such disputes over turnout are common in France, where official and union estimates of protest crowds routinely diverge by wide margins.
Paris saw the largest single gathering of the day. Even on the Interior Ministry's lower estimate, 110,000 people marched in the capital, while the CGT put the Paris crowd at 250,000. The rival figures, released within hours of each other, set the tone for a familiar argument over the size — though not the significance — of the day.
Tear gas in eight cities
About 70,000 security personnel were deployed across the country for the day of protests, according to the authorities. As tensions rose, police used tear gas in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes. By the end of the day, nearly 1,000 people had been arrested nationwide.
The arrests were spread across the country rather than concentrated in the capital alone, reflecting how widely the protests had spread beyond Paris. With about 70,000 security personnel on duty — roughly one for every six demonstrators on the government's own turnout estimate — the authorities had prepared for a major day of unrest, and the use of tear gas in eight separate cities showed how confrontations developed in parallel across France rather than in a single flashpoint.
Two people seriously injured
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said two people were seriously injured during the day, one in Toulouse and one in Clermont-Ferrand. The minister's statement was the clearest official account of the day's casualties. No further official details about the condition of the two injured people, or how they were hurt, were immediately available in the initial reports from the scene.
A second weekend of unrest
Saturday's marches were the second nationwide round of cost-of-living protests in little more than a week. The earlier demonstrations, held about a week before, ended with 2,700 arrests — a figure that makes Saturday's tally of nearly 1,000 arrests the smaller of the two, even as the crowds remained large. The back-to-back weekends of protest show the depth of anger over the cost of living, the issue that brought demonstrators onto the streets in cities and towns across the country.
For the government, the second mass weekend in little more than a week presents a continuing challenge: the crowds, on either side's count, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and the protests show no sign of being a one-day event. For the unions and organizers, the turnout — which they put at nearly 800,000 — is evidence that anger over the cost of living remains widespread. What both sides' figures agree on is the scale: a nationwide day of protest that filled streets across France and ended with nearly 1,000 people in custody.
Sources: AP, AFP