Mobilization of October 17: Roof and belfry collapsed… Limoges town hall burned down during the violence

In Limoges, the main power building bears the scars of violence on the sidelines of the mobilization against the high cost of living. The town hall was set on fire on Saturday by radical individuals at the end of the demonstration.

A “heritage disaster”, according to the prefect

The building is “very heavily damaged” and “largely lost”, the mayor of the town and the prefect of Haute-Vienne estimated in the evening.

“The roof collapsed on the lower floors, except in the west wing, and two-thirds of the facade has already disappeared,” declared state representative Maurice Barate, referring to a “heritage catastrophe” and denouncing a “voluntary act of thugs, not demonstrators”. “They set fire to a building in which there were people, elected officials, municipal police officers and service agents,” he stressed, specifying that no one was injured.

“The belfry collapsed earlier, so the town hall is very, very heavily damaged,” added the mayor, Guillaume Guérin (LR), very moved, during a press conference in the premises of the metropolis, which he chairs.

A town hall employee in tears

On site, hundreds of people watched, between anger and dismay, as the blaze ravaged the building inaugurated in 1883 and with architecture inspired by the Paris City Hall. A town hall employee was crying in the arms of an elected official.

Around 5,000 people, including several hundred “radicalized and extremely violent” individuals according to the prefect, participated in the demonstration organized as part of the national day of mobilization. Initial clashes pitted the latter against the police, who faced “a rain of projectiles” near the highway that the crowd was seeking to invade. “Motorists were attacked, a windshield broken,” detailed the prefect.

Police cars burned

The town hall was then targeted, with individuals breaking windows to get inside and set fire, before attacking the prefecture, while “looters of opportunity” attacked businesses in the city center. “The national police no longer had sufficient means of de-encirclement, they no longer had the capacity to contain the thousand madmen, anarchos, ultra-leftists, thugs on the boulevards,” criticized Guillaume Guérin. According to the mayor, municipal police officers managed to escape from the town hall “when these barbarians returned, explaining to them that they were going to kill them […] these are the terms that were used this evening”. “There are responsibilities that will have to be sought but in any case they do not lie with the police. »

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“It’s not stupidity, it’s hatred, it’s hatred of the French flag […] It’s hatred of institutions, it’s hatred of high school principals, it’s hatred of cops, it’s hatred of elected officials, it’s hatred of everything that embodies authority. It’s not petty criminals who did this, they’re very methodical people,” insisted the councilor. Four national police cars and two municipal police cars were burned or heavily damaged during the violence.