Thousands of protesters are expected to pour onto city streets across France again on Saturday, a now-weekly expression of national grievance that has led to clashes between protesters and the police, and kept the country on edge.
Adding to those fears: Halloween, which also falls on Saturday. The French authorities, citing calls on social media for people to revolt and encouraging them to wear masks and costumes, warned that the risk of a new outbreak of violence was high.
Huge demonstrations last Saturday did not descend into the lawlessness that erupted the week before, in part because of a heavy security force, which will be marshaled again. In Paris, the authorities moved the route for marchers to the city’s eastern periphery, as they did previously, drawing outrage and fruitless legal challenges from organizers.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, warned on Thursday that it could be a “day with a very high risk to public order.” He promised to deploy 70,000 police officers, matching the numbers on Oct. 24. That operation helped keep a lid on outbreaks of arson and looting, although there were clashes as the police tried to disperse the crowds in the evening.
There is ample fuel for a repeat of those combustible scenes. Students, who are returning to school on Monday after a two-week break, were not mollified by the government’s initial response to their demands. The Education Ministry agreed to cap some class sizes, offer low-interest loans to rebuild school buildings and phase out an unpopular online college admissions platform.
The students vowed to go on protesting. Their two-month-old movement has grown to include university students, public workers and veterans of the “yellow vest” movement that convulsed France from 2018 to 2020.
While tensions could rise during the day, the authorities said they were most worried about trouble breaking out after nightfall.
“We are seeing numerous calls to gather coming from the far left, the radicalized extreme left, and from certain radicalized ‘yellow vests’ websites, which are urging people to attend rallies or public gatherings starting at 8 p.m. in many cities across France,” Mr. Nuñez said at a news conference.
Some of the messages were violent, Mr. Nuñez said, calling for “revolution” and “insurrection.” Those gatherings will be forbidden, and any attempt to gather in spite of the ban will lead to arrests, he said.
Demonstrators have been encouraged on social media to turn up wearing Halloween costumes. Mr. Nuñez warned it was a criminal offense to conceal one’s face during a demonstration in which public order is disrupted.
French officials are increasingly concerned about the role played by social media in attracting people and inciting them to violent behavior. Speculation that the government considered temporarily suspending several popular sites drew a denial from President Emmanuel Macron himself.
But in an interview on YouTube, Mr. Macron said that social media platforms would be required “to remove illegal content, and to be very vigilant about the use of certain features to prevent them from being misused by people who want to engage in looting or other such activities.”
That followed a report by a left-leaning online news site that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu had sent a letter to leading telecommunications operators, asking them to be prepared to block Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Mr. Lecornu’s office declined to comment on the authenticity of the letter.
Of the four reported recipients, one did not respond to questions and two declined to comment. A spokesman for the fourth, Orange, the only one in which the state is a shareholder, declined to confirm that a letter was received, but said that “like any other operator, we are required to comply with the obligations legally imposed on us by the competent authorities, in accordance with applicable law.”
While the government has blamed far-left activists for much of the mayhem, officials confirmed that bands of young men with links to the far right have also infiltrated the demonstrations. They use the pretext of protecting shop owners but often end up in clashes with far-left groups.
In the southern city of Nice, 11 far-right activists were arrested on Oct. 24 after about 100 masked people attacked protesters, leaving three people injured.
“When these small groups form, as they have sometimes done, into combat units, that alone is sufficient grounds to initiate legal action,” Mr. Nuñez said on Thursday.
Giulia Imbert contributed reporting.
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