"We are more and more numerous": the sanitary pass does not disarm

From Paris to Marseille and from Lille to Bordeaux, tens of thousands of opponents of all stripes of the health pass demonstrated for the fifth Saturday in a row "for the freedom to choose", after the system was generalized in most places public.

"People are going to get vaccinated crying"

In the capital, the two main processions pounded the pavement behind a wide range of slogans such as "liberate France", "stop coronafolie" or "take back your Macron pass and get out".

"To have to present a pass to go to the bar, to the hospital, to the cinema, there is nothing more we can do. People will be vaccinated crying, I have a friend who felt raped", cowardly at microphone of Europe 1 a demonstrator of one of the two Parisian processions.

"We are more and more numerous, it is very encouraging. The government must be careful so that the 'minority', as they call us with contempt, do not turn into a minority of the ultras with violence", launches a other.

In Lille, 2,650 demonstrators, according to the prefecture, led by many "yellow vests", traversed the city center.

Marie, a 36-year-old nurse from the Valenciennes hospital center, came to defend "true freedom, that of the body and of conscience".

"I am totally against the obligation to be vaccinated, especially since we are still at an experimental stage," she argued, ready to change jobs rather than be vaccinated.

A motley event

Begun in the heart of summer, this heterogeneous anti-government mobilization continues to grow.

Across the country, they were just over 237,000 last week, according to the Interior Ministry, more than double the size of the movement's beginnings in mid-July.

Protesters accuse the government of underestimating the anti-health pass protest.

The militant collective Le Nombre Jaune, which publishes a city-by-city count, last Saturday recorded more than 415,000 "minimum" participants in France.

Some 250,000 people are still expected in the streets this weekend, according to a police source.

A "movement that we talk about too much", according to Véran

Without major incident so far, the protest attracts families and apolitical first-time demonstrators as well as caregivers or firefighters in uniform and goes beyond the sole anti-vaccine or conspiracy movement.

A fringe of this very diverse movement, without any real head, assumes an uninhibited anti-Semitism, while certain vaccination centers or pharmacies are treated as "collaborators" and victims of malicious acts.

These accusations annoy the government, faced with a deadly explosion of the epidemic in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

From the reconfigured Martinique, the Minister of Health Olivier Véran castigated Thursday a movement "about which we talk too much", and which sports "extremely colorful signs and sometimes extremely dubious, or even completely dirty reasons."

The executive still hopes to convince the undecided to achieve the goal of 50 million French people having received a first injection at the end of August, by brandishing the catastrophic situation in the West Indies as a foil.