Tens of thousands of people took part in calm, peaceful marches through major French cities including Paris on Saturday, supporting schoolchildren’s demands for more teachers and repairs to decrepit schools. The marches, attended by parents, teachers, grandparents, students and workers protesting over the high cost of living, came after four weeks of street marches and barricades of schools. But separately to those peaceful demonstrations, other groups clashed with police and set sporadic fires in cities including Paris, Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille, with masked looters smashing shopfronts in Paris, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has criticised the “unbridled violence” that left public buildings burned and at least 2,400 people arrested in cities across the country.
Macron said a distinction must be drawn between genuine, peaceful demonstrators making demands over the cost of living and the education system, and others who “destroy, ransack and loot”. “Watching these images, we have all asked ourselves how could French people do this to France?” he said in a televised address. He said “nothing justifies” violence and that local state officials would be able to ban certain street gatherings if they deemed it necessary, and criticised what he called “factious groups from the ultra-left, joined by numerous delinquents”.
Grégory Doucet, the Green mayor of Lyon, 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 the roots of violence, telling Le Monde: “I’m stunned by the violence against public and state property. I saw and heard fear and anger. Shop owners felt abandoned.”
Benoît Payan, the Socialist mayor of Marseille, where masked groups stormed the city hall and a police station, said questions must be asked about policing tactics, as other town hall buildings, for example in Lille, were also targeted. He 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.”
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 on Saturday as state buildings were stormed and torched, bus stops smashed, roads barricaded and shops broken into and destroyed. Protests also took place in Spain, Italy and Portugal.
Crowds clashed with police at Place de la République in central Paris on Sunday afternoon as violence flared for a second day. Electric bikes were piled in some streets and set alight. Bottles and rocks were thrown and thick plumes of smoke rose from burning bins. Police responded with teargas and stun grenades.
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 ammunition,” Guérin said. He called this “a colossal failure of the state”.
Traders’ unions said more than 1,500 shops and businesses had been ransacked, with the 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 nearly 2,400 arrests and almost 1,000 police and gendarmes injured on Saturday, seven seriously. A 17-year-old boy had his right hand blown off by a crowd-control grenade in the east-central city of Saint-Étienne. A 17-year-old girl lost an eye in Mulhouse and a police investigation was opened into the circumstances.
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.”
