France lets police bring back stun grenades if violence comes, as some 500 demonstrations are called for October 17 and the prime minister says the movement has changed

France goes into Saturday with the police getting a banned weapon back and the government saying the protests have become something else.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu told reporters on Thursday that authorities fear unrest during the demonstrations planned for the weekend, and that the wave of protest no longer resembles a student movement but a movement of urban violence. Hundreds of demonstrations, more than 500 by the count in French reporting, have been called for Saturday across the country. The date is not an accident: October 17 is the anniversary of the Yellow Vest protests that paralysed France in 2019, and veterans of that movement have spent the week rallying online alongside the students, under a joined up slogan the French press has rendered as the Young Vests.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, meeting prefects ahead of the day, said riot police will be able to use all intermediate weapons at their disposal if serious acts of violence occur in major cities, including stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullet launchers. The stun grenades had been suspended only days earlier, after an incident in Lens where a student lost his hand trying to throw one back at officers. President Macron had called then for ethics and proportionality. The restoration is conditional, in the minister's telling, on the violence it is meant to answer.

The numbers behind the argument are three weeks deep. The government says more than 6,800 people have been taken into police custody since the movement began, with minors making up 86 percent of those detained, and the police watchdog has opened 36 investigations. Human rights groups, in figures carried by El Mundo, count more than 9,000 arrests and over a thousand injured, among them 930 police officers, 147 teachers and school staff, and more than a hundred students, including a student who lost an eye to a rubber bullet launcher. Student leaders met officials at the education ministry on Thursday afternoon. The government has conceded the grievances are legitimate and promised measures including 3,000 substitute teachers, which protesters call inadequate.

The movement began over crowded classrooms and decaying schools and has become a general confrontation over the cost of living and the conduct of the police. Saturday is also the first day of the two week fall school holiday, which cuts both ways: fewer school blockades to defend, and more people free to march. This site has followed the French protests through the week. October 17 is the day both sides have been pointing at, and both have now said what they intend to bring to it.