Students, unions and Yellow Vests march across France in the largest protest day of the autumn, and the government warns of urban violence

It started in school corridors in the poor northern suburbs of Paris. On Saturday it was on the streets of the whole country.

Tens of thousands of people were expected to protest across France on Saturday, Reuters reported, as students, trade unionists and what remains of the Yellow Vest movement marched together against high prices and the state of public services. Organisers and officials counted actions in hundreds of places, from marches in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes and Toulouse to gatherings at roundabouts, service stations, railway stations and motorway toll barriers in provincial France. Authorities expected a turnout in the tens of thousands and prepared large deployments of police and gendarmes.

The first wave began last month at high schools in Paris and its northern suburbs, where anger over absent teachers and shabby buildings widened within weeks into a movement about inequality, weak public spending and falling standards. Teachers, firefighters, farmers and the CGT union have since attached their own grievances to it, and Yellow Vest veterans brought the form of protest they invented in 2018, the occupied roundabout, back into national life on the anniversary of their own movement.

The government has stopped describing this as a student dispute. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Thursday that authorities fear unrest, that the wave of demonstrations no longer resembles a student movement, and that it has become a movement of urban violence. He called the moment one of fatigue in the country, in an atmosphere of permanent crisis made of wars, inflation and purchasing power. The government blames the hard left party France Unbowed for inflaming the protests, an accusation the party denies. The Interior Ministry authorised riot police to use stun grenades again if violence comes, reversing a suspension imposed after a boy of 15 was badly injured, and ministers said blockades of essential infrastructure would not be tolerated.

President Macron called for calm. He is in the final stretch of his presidency, the electorate is polarised, and investors have been selling French debt and driving borrowing costs to their highest levels in more than two decades, a measure of how little room the state has left to buy its way out of a street movement. Opposition leader Jordan Bardella, whose National Rally leads in the polls ahead of next year presidential election, said he expected violence and called it a day of chaos for France. By Saturday evening the count of marchers, arrests and injuries will say how much of that warning was politics and how much was forecast, as of October 17. The picture with this story is an illustration of a Paris march, not a photograph.