Anatomy of a successful protest: France, “No Kings” and the necessity of disruption

On Oct. 18, over seven million people gathered across all 50 states to participate in the latest iteration of the “No Kings” protest, which remains one of the largest protest movements in American history.

They’re also kind of disappointing.

The “No Kings” protests are designed to be as accessible and uncontroversial as possible. Their website explicitly states, “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action and no civil disobedience.”

Of course, people will show up if there’s no risk.

Beyond the lack of disruption, the protest organizers have very nebulous demands. They’re vaguely in opposition to the Trump administration, and the closest they’ve come to an outright demand is claiming that the executive branch is undermining the Constitution.

To be clear, it’s undeniably positive that so many people are willing to organize around resisting authoritarianism. But it hasn’t been all that successful. The Trump administration hasn’t made many concessions, and while Democrats dominated the midterms, that had more to do with Republican incompetence than the protests.

“No Kings” misses the two fundamental aspects of successful protests. 

First, you need concrete demands. If the target of your protest doesn’t know what you want, they can’t adhere to your requests. 

Second, you need to be disruptive. If the only thing your protest does is give people signs and places to stand, that does very little to meaningfully obstruct the powers that be. A peaceful protest is supposed to be an implied threat of disobedience. A message that says, “We can get this many people to resist in other ways if we choose.” 

Instead, we are now past the fourth iteration of the protests with no change in tactics.

Across the pond, protesters are taking a different approach.

In France, a combination of education walkouts and cost-of-living protests has the country in a state of disorder. Millions of people have taken to the streets. Union leaders have largely organized the protests, representing thousands of people across major industries.

These protests check the boxes.

The union organizers have concrete demands: a 10% minimum wage increase, higher spending on public services and more. Teachers are demanding pay increases, smaller class sizes and better school infrastructure.

They’re also very disruptive.

If you’re on social media, you may have seen videos of buildings on fire and protesters attacking cops (based) and come to the assumption that France is literally falling apart. As always, those examples are the exception.

But even the more peaceful protests are disruptive.

These mobilizations include thousands of workers on strike. Sixteen percent of teachers walked out in an industry that already faces severe underemployment. Commuter rail systems ground to a halt as workers left their stations. 

And it’s working.

The French government has already announced it will add 500 teaching positions and invest more in school infrastructure.

But the protests continue, and their leaders assure the public they will keep going until their demands are met. 

Protests can be both peaceful and disruptive. People often point to the American Civil Rights Movement as a successful example of peaceful protest, but fail to acknowledge that it relied more on civil disobedience than anything else. 

The sit-ins and boycotts were peaceful, but undeniably disruptive. That framing also ignores the impact of groups like the Black Panther Party, as well as the fact that many organizers believed in self-defense and often had armed guards patrolling protests.

But this incessant notion that a good protest has to be peaceful begs an important question.

Why can the state enact violence against us, but our response has to be peaceful?

State violence isn’t just a police shooting or an ICE agent kidnapping someone off the street. It’s also letting people die homeless in the cold because our welfare programs are insufficient. It’s someone dying of a curable condition because the healthcare system is fundamentally broken. 

We’ve been conditioned to see those not as state violence, but as systemic injustices. They’re both.

Disruption is the backbone of citizen-led change. France understands that. Americans don’t seem to yet. 

Hopefully, without a monopoly on power in Washington, D.C., conservatives won’t be able to behave as tyrannically anymore. 

That doesn’t mean we should get complacent. 

If your new legislators won’t be better, don’t be quiet. 

Be disruptive.