Counting of demonstrators: ministry, CGT, independent firms... Why these figures are so different?

Romain Rouillard 07h00, 06 April 2023

740,000 demonstrators everywhere in France according to the Ministry of the Interior, more than 2 million according to the CGT. Tuesday, March 28, the tenth day of interprofessional mobilization against the pension reform again gave birth to two radically different figures. On January 31, while the Paris police prefecture had counted 87,000 demonstrators in the capital (500,000 according to the CGT), a third figure, put forward by the independent firm Occurrence, reported... 55,000 people. A surprisingly low result that had aroused the annoyance of the left and the trade union forces. How then to explain such differences when an eleventh day of strikes and demonstrations looms this Thursday, April 6?

The technique of counting by hand

To establish the number of people who beat the pavement on each day of mobilization, each of the parties uses its own method. That of the police consists of targeting three or four points of the route and counting the demonstrators in groups of ten by placing themselves in height. If we take the example of Paris, the final figure, communicated by the prefecture of police, follows from the average thus obtained. "The problem is that there is no transparency on the process used by the prefecture. We do not have the report of the field officers. We do not have the detail that would make it possible to verify that there is no eel under rock," said Laurent Frajerman, a historian specializing in social movements.

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For their part, unions are generally not very talkative when discussing their counting technique. Most of the time, they use activists along the entire length of the processions. The latter count one by one the lines of demonstrators who march in front of them while estimating approximately the number of people who compose them. The final estimate is based on the product of these two figures. Like the process adopted by the prefecture of police, this technique is based on a standard demonstration pattern where participants progress linearly in the procession while remaining in their ranks. "This model does not take into account the fact that people will circulate throughout the demonstration," notes Laurent Frajerman.

Occurrence uses technology

Finally, a third method, acclaimed by the independent firm Occurrence, uses technological tools allowing, a priori, to obtain more reliable results than the good old manual counting. To achieve this, a virtual line is drawn up in the middle of the procession and a sensor counts all the demonstrators who cross it. A system already used in airports, fanzones or department stores to count the number of visitors. "It starts from a good idea but lately, Occurrence has often given the same figures as the police headquarters. Or much lower numbers. I think they have a problem of accuracy when the density is too important, "says Laurent Frajerman.

A failure that Assaël Adary, president of this independent firm, readily acknowledges. "That's why we correct with a manual count," he said in the columns of Le Figaro. A war of figures that should manifest itself again on Thursday where up to 800,000 people are expected everywhere in France, according to information from Europe 1.