Paris Demonstrators Ordered to March Only Along Routes Officially Certified by Interior Ministry Cartographers
After a week of unrest, the French Interior Ministry has required every marcher to rehearse the approved route before being allowed onto it.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced on Saturday that all demonstrators in France would be required to complete a supervised walking rehearsal of the approved route before being permitted to join the national march. Thirty-five thousand people gathered in the Paris region for the day's mobilisation, and officials said the rehearsal policy had already been applied to each of them at the Porte d'Italie.
Police commanders said the rehearsal consisted of walking the designated course at a measured pace under the eyes of ministry staff, with stops at marked benches and water points. Anyone who strayed from the line was returned to the start to begin again. Officials said 135 people had been held in the first hours of the day, most of them for failing the second pass.
« The route is the route, » said a senior ministry official who asked not to be named because he was still walking the course at the time of the briefing. « A citizen who has not rehearsed the route cannot know where the route is. »
In Orléans, local authorities said between eleven and twenty-six thousand people had turned up, a range the prefecture described as fully compliant. Organisers in Lyon and Marseille, where marches had been banned outright, were offered the same rehearsal in private courtyards, which they declined. The ministry has since ordered the surfacing of the Paris course in a single shade of grey so that the approved line can be seen from the air.
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