PLEASE read the entire body of this post and any updates in pinned comments before posting individual questions below. This post is up-to-date as of 21:30 on Sunday 18 October.
Tl;dr: Paris is calm today; Paris is expected to be generally calm over the next two fall holiday weeks; no specific information is available about a possible but not yet defined strike on 5 November; no announcements have been made about protests on any future dates; your friendly mod needs a break from answering individual travel planning questions but doesn't think you should cancel your trip.
Is Paris safe from protests today?
If by today you mean the day of this writing, Sunday 18 October, yes. I just got back from a long walk around my neighborhood (the Canal Saint Martin) and the Place de la République, and all I saw were lots of people doing the same thing, or going about their usual Sundays, as well as many many street cleaners hard at work. No news sources are reporting any disturbances today and there are no noteworthy interruptions to any tourist activities. If you decide to go out looking today, my only word of caution would be to wear good shoes, as there is quite a lot of broken glass in some areas.
As of this update at 21:30, there appear to be some further incidents of vandalism and looting occurring, principally around Les Halles, and largely isolated but definitely happening. Pay attention to your surroundings if you're out on foot.
What is next?
The President spoke at 20:00 and said ... not much of anything. As of this writing, I have not seen any information countering the previous expectation that the student protests, as a general matter, will be substantially calmer for the next two weeks (that is, 19 October through 1 November), as schools are now on their fall break. I'll continue to update.
Following the fall break, there has been a call for a general strike, which if it materializes will come with a rally and march, on Thursday 5 November. At this time, there are no specific details about the scope or potential impacts of this strike. It MAY affect train travel around France and transit within Paris. I will update as soon as any specifics are available. This is one site I use to track strike information.
As a general note, strikes announced for a particular day are on that day and do not roll or spill-over without warning. There is no need to be concerned about travel on other dates in November as a result of the call for a strike on the 5th.
Will there be protests on {any specific upcoming dates}? Should I cancel my trip on {any upcoming dates}?
At this time, no specific protest dates have been announced other than the general strike call discussed above. I have no further information about that potential strike or about any possible future protests.
Please understand that French protests, scary as they may seem from the outside, do occur within a fairly well-organized framework. If there are going to be protests on any given date, we will have advance warning. But also, we are not expected to be in some kind of continual rolling protest state from now til forever. People have finite energy and personal and organizational resources, even when they're really mad. The fall is often the ''strike season,'' and the holidays are generally pretty quiet, and then things will probably pick up again as we head towards the spring presidential election, but trying to make guesses about whether there will be protests on any given set of future dates is pointless.
Also, I know that the media coverage is very scary, especially about what happened yesterday. But none of these protests, including yesterday's, forced the closure of any major tourist locations. There have, and will continue to be, periodic strikes for different reasons at the Arc de Triomphe, Louvre, and Catacombs; those relate to issues at those specific sites and not the student protests. There was very little activity yesterday anywhere on the Left Bank (south of the river), and many neighborhoods on the Right Bank were entirely unaffected. Trains were unaffected, so people had access to many many day trips in the Paris area if they wanted to avoid all of the protest activity entirely.
All of this is to say: the protests aren't about you, as a tourist, and they're unlikely to affect you, as a tourist, even if they are scheduled during your stay, which you cannot predict. Therefore, it has been and remains my view that cancelling any trips for fear of protests is a waste of the time, money, and resources you've already spent planning.
Mod Note
On a personal note, I am doing my best to keep these posts accurate and updated. I understand each of your personal concerns, I genuinely do, but I am getting pretty burned out from answering individual questions with variations on the same information already stated in the post (and also I really want to move on to the holiday megathread, which many of you have been asking for!). So I am going to take a break from personal responses this week, to the extent that questions posed below cover the same ground in this post, but will of course update if and when any more specific information is available.
And edited with an additional note: we would all appreciate your help keeping the thread focused and on-topic for the subreddit, which is to provide information to tourists. General political commentary or argumentation, and drive-by inflammatory comments from people with no history on our subreddit and no interest in what we do here, will be strictly moderated.
