The French government was in crisis talks on Sunday after one of the most violent days of unrest in years left public buildings burned, hundreds of shops destroyed and looted, and more than 2000 people arrested in cities across the country.
Politicians on the left and right called for the resignation of the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, after the government appeared to have been caught by surprise by the scale of violence as state buildings were stormed and torched, bus stops smashed, roads barricaded and shops broken into and destroyed.
The president, Emmanuel Macron, who is standing down next spring, was preparing to address the nation on Sunday night. He wrote on social media there was “no place for violence” in France.
Police and officials faced challenges of different types on Saturday. First, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters attended calm marches through major cities including Paris, supporting schoolchildren’s demands for more teachers and repairs to decrepit schools. Those marches, which came after four weeks of street marches and barricades of schools, were attended by parents, teachers and grandparents as well as students and workers protesting over the high cost of living. The demonstrators carried banners saying the government was not listening to them and calling for more money for public services.
But separately to those peaceful demonstrations, different groups caught police and officials by surprise with moving gatherings, sporadic burning, the barricading of streets and clashing with police in cities including Paris, Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille.
Finally, masked looters took advantage of what French media called the “chaos” on the streets to smash shopfronts and grab goods. In Paris, groups of looters, some of whom appeared to be children, were seen running through the night with clothes and shoeboxes after masked adult men smashed shopfronts.
In Paris, where police said a record 855 people had been arrested, the burnt-out remains of barricades built using bikes, bins and other materials littered streets on Sunday. Several streets had smashed shop windows and the remains of torched cars. The capital had experienced “a level of violence that we have never seen before, I believe”, said the Socialist deputy mayor, Lamia El Aaraje.
In Limoges in central France, where the 19th-century town hall was burned down, the mayor, Guillaume Guérin, said the people who stormed his building “were not demonstrators that defend causes” but “people organised for war”. He said those who stormed and torched the town hall had told a building caretaker he would be killed, and told elected officials they would “burn”. He said there had been a failure of the state to deal with the crisis.
“Around 3:30pm our municipal police, although present in number, found themselves no longer able to fight against the violence of rioters because they had run out of munition,” Guérin said. He called this “a colossal failure of the state”.
In Marseille, where masked groups stormed the city hall and a police station, the Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, told BFMTV: “I have no words … I never thought I’d ever live through something like this. Hordes of rioters and looters attacked our common [state] buildings … with no real demands, but with the sole aim to wreck the demands of those who had demonstrated legitimately.”
Payan said questions must be asked about policing tactics, as other town hall buildings, for example in Lille, were also targeted.
Grégory Doucet, the Green mayor of Lyon, said he had never seen such violence in his city, including the torching of the historic tourist office. He told Le Monde: “I’m stunned by the violence against public and state property. I saw and heard fear and anger. Shop-owners felt abandoned.”
Doucet said the government must find a “sense of nuance” in properly examining what happened and “avoiding stereotypes”. He said the government needed to give a political response to long-running societal demands from peaceful demonstrators on one hand, and also examine roots of violence.
Traders’ unions said over 1,500 shops and businesses had been ransacked with a cost running into tens of millions of euros. “This had nothing to do with the peaceful protesters,” said one shoe-shop owner in Paris. “These were organised groups who were breaking things and looting. We’d never seen anything like it.”
Opposition politicians questioned the government’s policing tactics, saying there had been a lack of state intelligence.
The interior ministry said there had been more than 2,000 arrests and about 600 police, firefighters and paramedics had been hurt. A 17-year-old boy had his right hand blown off by a crowd-control grenade in the southern city of Saint-Étienne.
Macron’s centrist government and the far-right frontrunner for the presidential election, Marine Le Pen, both blamed what they called “ultra-left” groups for the violence. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said the government would not be “intimidated” by violence, and blamed the unrest on the “ultra-left” and criminals.
The radical-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who attended the peaceful street demonstration in Paris on Saturday, accused the government of organisational failings that had “opened the door to chaos”.
Lecornu replied on social media: “Laying the responsibility for violence on heads of police is a dangerous and cynical reversal of responsibilities.”
