The devastation was still visible in Paris on Sunday: shops were smashed and looted, trash cans were torched. Street cleaning is in action. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands initially demonstrated peacefully. Then the situation escalated in many cities and especially in Paris. The mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, spoke of a “systematic destruction” of certain streets.
In the center of the city on Saturday, violent young people and highly armed police faced each other head-on. On the large boulevards in the east around the Place de la République, groups destroyed facades, looted shops and set fires. There was a mixture of tear gas and the smell of burning across entire city districts.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez spoke of “riots of unprecedented proportions”. 500 police officers were injured and around 1,800 people were arrested. Other cities were also hit hard. In Limoges, the town hall, which is a listed building, was largely burned out; in Marseille, rioters broke into the town hall. In total, 1,500 shops were destroyed, according to the French Federation of Trade and Distribution (FCD).
Protesters were also injured. In Saint-Étienne, a young demonstrator lost his hand to a police grenade.
For three weeks now, schoolchildren and students in France have been taking to the streets to demand better learning conditions. On Saturday, several protest movements came together to fight against high costs of living and for better education. The Interior Minister counted 550,000 demonstrators. But violent groups mixed in with them.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu sees the extreme left as responsible. He criticized “groups of rioters, several hundred – sometimes even several thousand depending on the location – who were clearly instigated by the extreme left.” President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Platform X: “There is no place for violence in our republic.”
In the aftermath of the protests, a battle for the sovereignty of interpretation broke out. The different political camps blame each other for the escalation.
Marine Le Pen of the right-wing Rassemblement National blamed the radical left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon directly for the violence. Mélenchon, in turn, blamed police violence for some of the unrest. At the same time, he wrote on X that “those who share our struggle must not engage in looting or vandalism.” US Vice President J.D. joined from abroad. Vance, who attributed the riots to a failed immigration policy.
The extreme left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI) has been accused for weeks of politically exploiting the student protests and fueling confrontations with the police. Some representatives of the extreme left aggressively portray the police operations as systematic repression.
Recently there were concerns as to whether the so-called yellow vest movement would flare up again. In France, higher fuel taxes triggered the “yellow vest” protests in 2018. The very heterogeneous movement protested for months, sometimes violently, first against a planned increase in fuel taxes and later against high costs of living and social inequality.
Pollster Frédéric Dabi from the Ifop Institute warned on Sunday of a “wildfire”. The reason also lies in the upcoming presidential elections in six months. As he told the AFP news agency, there was dissatisfaction “with the election offer, in which only a few candidates are in favor of renewal”. In surveys, 80 percent of those surveyed were pessimistic about the future.
The unrest is also increasing pressure on President Macron and his government. Six months before the presidential elections, they can only introduce limited reforms to calm the situation.
