According to figures from the Ministry of the Interior, they were 237,000 pounding the pavement throughout France on August 7 for the fourth Saturday of anti-health pass demonstrations.
And as for each new mobilization, criticism fires at the announcement of the number of demonstrators identified by the authorities.
Since July 24, the alternative counter of protesters the Yellow Number, originally created to identify the troops of the yellow vests movement, has resumed service.
“
We know the job, we have the methods, we have the team to do it.
As long as we have the means, let's do it!
», Launches Valérie, one of the administrators of the Facebook page, at
Le Figaro
.
Read also: Covid-19: how far could the health pass be extended?
"
Taken aback
" for the first two mobilizations against the health pass (July 14 and 17), the group began to count the demonstrators from July 24.
That Saturday, the Yellow Number estimated the marchers at a minimum of 321,267 out of 185 gatherings, against 161,000 people identified by the government.
On July 31, the third Saturday of mobilization, the alternative counter displays a minimum of 373,540 demonstrators out of 192 rallies, against the 204,090 given by the Ministry of the Interior.
Last Saturday, the volunteers counted 415,061 demonstrators against 237,000 announced by the authorities.
A method established since the yellow vests
The method has not changed much since the creation of the page. The referents in the field, mostly former yellow vests, send videos by message to the Facebook page. Then, Valérie publishes them on a Facebook group where a dozen or so volunteers are gathered, and she distributes the videos for counting, which is done either "
by density, or with full videos, or some on site
". With a precise list of demonstrations, if no figure has been given, volunteers go in search of the number of demonstrators given. As a last resort, they will use the one collected by the local media. A team of "
verifiers
" determine if the sources are correct and ensure the consistency of the information.
In the Yellow Number, “we find the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
We are not debating this subject ”.
Valerie
The Facebook group that brings together the volunteers is also the same as that of the yellow vests.
There is a teacher from National Education, a logistics manager and a woman who works in family care for disabled people.
Valérie is an editor.
Other profiles emerge among the volunteers: a caregiver, a retiree, a teacher and a psychologist.
“They are quite varied,
” comments Valérie, specifying that among the volunteers, some are vaccinated and others are not.
"
We are not debating the subject,
" she said, however.
Sanitary anti-pass, a more heterogeneous movement
The Ministry of the Interior and the Yellow Number all the same agree on one fact: since the first demonstration, on July 14, the mobilization continues to grow. Will the ranks of the movement grow so far until the start of the school year? “
Personally, I thought that after the Constitutional Council the figure would drop, and in fact no, it was the opposite.
Valérie therefore does not prefer to comment on the subject. According to her, there are also a lot of first-time demonstrators: "
They are people worried about the vaccine, not necessarily anti-vaccine, even if there necessarily is
."
The administrator of the Yellow Number notes that the demonstrations bring together "
really everything
": "
There are people politicized, not politicized ... The yellow vests on the ground came to tell me" ah bah hold, it's more BCBG that the yellow vests "(...) It is true that the yellow vests represented a certain social class, the invisible, precarious workers, etc. So people who found themselves with a certain social label, and there no, not at all.
"
Finally, the group of the Yellow Number is found in the demands: "
If it was a pro-pass demonstration, we would not count
". “
We believe that this is part of the fight of the yellow vests, on issues of democracy and transparency. That's all we've been asking for for two and a half years
”. This is not the first time that the Yellow Number has counted demonstrators: the pension reform, the comprehensive security law and the demonstrations of caregivers at the end of the first confinement have also come under the magnifying glass of the Facebook group.