French interior ministry counts 86,000 at Tuesday's lycée marches outside Paris

France's third day of high-school blockades produced two incompatible headcounts before Paris had even marched. The interior ministry told AFP that 86,000 people were on the street on Tuesday morning outside the Paris region. The CGT, counting the same geography, said 260,000. The Union syndicale lycéenne said 1,800 lycées were blocked, which it called a new record. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez, earlier in the day, had spoken only of "a few dozen" blockades or gatherings in front of schools, in Paris, Strasbourg, Rennes, Lyon, Nîmes and Toulon among other cities.

The marches are billed by organisers as "acte 3". They began around 10:00 in Marseille, Lyon, Nantes, Limoges, Belfort and about thirty towns in all. Teachers, students and union contingents were due to join the school cortèges. In Paris the call was for 14:00 at Place de la République, so the morning figures deliberately exclude the capital. Any national total published tonight has to add that square or it is not a national total.

The gap between 86,000 and 260,000 is the usual French counting dispute, and it is large enough to matter. The ministry counts from police estimates on the pavement. Unions count from their own stewards and from local reports. A threefold difference on the same morning, in the same cities, means the two methods are not measuring the same thing, or one of them is wrong. Readers who want a single number will not get one. The usable fact is the range, and the fact that both counts exclude Paris.

The school-blockade claim is a third method again. The lycée union's 1,800 is a count of establishments, not of people. Nuñez's "few dozen" was an early-morning police tally of sites already blocked or gathered, not a forecast of the day. Both can be true at 8:00 and false by noon. Monday's official picture, from education minister Édouard Geffray, was that 400 to 500 high schools would be fully or partly closed, after 24 schools were burned or ransacked and 78 staff were wounded in the first wave. Nuñez said 1,747 people had been arrested on Friday. Tuesday's ministry count of marchers does not update those arrest or damage figures.

What changed on Tuesday is the decision by trade unions to walk with the students. A school blockade is a local action: a gate, a handful of pupils, a head teacher deciding whether to open. A union cortège in thirty cities is a national action, with stewards, routes agreed or not agreed with the prefecture, and a Paris finale at a square the police know how to hold. That is why the interior ministry briefed a morning number before the capital moved. It fixes a floor the government can defend if the afternoon is larger.

The political stake is whether acte 3 still looks like a school protest or has become a street protest with schools as the starting point. Geffray's Monday numbers were about buildings and injured staff. Tuesday's numbers are about bodies on the pavement. A movement that can put between 86,000 and 260,000 people out before Paris joins is past the stage where a school-by-school closure list describes it.

The missing figure, until the prefecture of police publishes it, is Place de la République after 14:00. Add that to the morning range and the day has a national total. Without it, the argument will be conducted on two partial counts and a union claim of 1,800 blocked schools.