FRANCE BREAKING:  THE COUNTDOWN TO PROTEST, CONTROVERSY OVER STUDENT ARRESTS

The French police forces including the special CRS riot police will be as fully mobilized as possible in Paris and other locations tomorrow as the "yellow vests" protests move into their next phase of mobilization swelled by new supporters.

125-thousand plus were estimated to have protested last Saturday and its quite possible the protests may be even larger tomorrow.

The Prime Minister of France's increasingly unpopular President Emmanuel Macron, Edouard Philippe, appeared on the evening television news Thursday to say 89-thousand police are mobilized for tomorrow's protests.

This was confirmed by France's Interior Minister at a news conference today (Friday) saying 8-thousand police will be in Paris and 89-thousand will be deployed nationwide.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner announced he's filing a complaint against Gaullist politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.   Dupont-Aignan is accused or urging police to join the protesters last Saturday.  Dupont-Aignan ran against Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the last presidential election and endorsed Macron's opponent in the final round,  Marine Le Pen.

Major public venues in Paris like the Eiffel Tower are closed tomorrow plus four major soccer matches in the country are cancelled tomorrow.

Public opinion polls say that 72 percent of the French public support the "yellow vests".

Yesterday a hundred or more high school students in Mantes-la-Jolie near Paris were told to get on their knees by police for a period of hours while they were taken into custody outside two high schools.

The police say there were confronted with stones, knives, batons and baseball bats.   Two cars were burned in the area.    The police employed tear gas and stun grenades on the group of protesters.

The latest from the spinners for President Macron, who has remained silent about the protests, is that he will talk to the French people next week with substantial proposals to answer public discontent.

Information and disinformation is being spread across France as the government works to shut down and disrupt tomorrow's planned protests.

A former Prime Minister of France, Eduoard Balladur, who advised then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou during the mass student protests of May 1968 has spoken on radio station Europe 1 in France.

Balladur says the situation today is different from 1968 in that the "yellow vests" movement is not an organized movement with a chain of command and a leader to speak with the government.  He also feels that there is less optimism in today's population and less respect for institutions like political parties and labor unions.

The 1968 student protests fizzled as they lost popular support but they did cut short the term of then President Charles de Gaulle who resigned 11 months later in April 1969.

In late news, France's Interior Minister Christophe Castaner says he is filing a complaint against political leader Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a Gaullist (follower of Charles de Gaulle), claiming that Dupont-Aignan called on police to join the protesters last Saturday.


Link to Google translation to English for BFM-TV....LINK