France Unrest Puts State Authority in Focus

More than 2,000 people were arrested and about 600 police officers, firefighters and paramedics were injured during unrest across France on Saturday, Oct. 17. Demonstrations began over the cost of living and public services. Separate groups set fires, looted shops and clashed with police in cities across the country. They attacked historic and public buildings, including Limoges’ town hall, which burned down.

Peaceful marches and public demands

Students, workers, parents, teachers and grandparents joined the demonstrations. Protesters called for more teachers, repairs to deteriorating schools and increased funding for public services; they also opposed the high cost of living. Banners said the government wasn’t listening.

The peaceful marches followed four weeks of street demonstrations and school barricades. Channel 4 reported that more than 500,000 people were thought to have taken part in demonstrations. The Irish Times reported that tens of thousands attended peaceful marches, while violence and looting happened separately in Paris, Bordeaux, Nice and Marseilles.

A crowd-control grenade incident in Saint-Étienne cost a 17-year-old boy his right hand. Hundreds of protesters gathered again at Paris’s Place de la République on Sunday, with police out in force. According to the Irish Times, the government held crisis talks.

Attacks on public buildings

Police said they had arrested a record 855 people in Paris. Burnt barricades made from bicycles, bins and other materials, smashed shop windows and the remains of torched cars still lined the streets on Sunday. Some looters appeared to be children. Masked adult men smashed shopfronts.

Limoges’ 19th-century town hall burned, and part of its roof collapsed. Mayor Guillaume Guérin said those who stormed the building “were not demonstrators that defend causes” but “people organised for war”. He said attackers threatened to kill a caretaker and told elected officials they would “burn”. Guérin said municipal police, though present in number, could no longer fight the rioters at about 3.30pm because they had run out of ammunition. He called it “a colossal failure of the state”.

In Marseilles, masked groups stormed city hall and a police station. 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.” Attackers also targeted town hall buildings elsewhere, including in Lille.

Green mayor of Lyons Grégory Doucet 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.” He urged the government to examine the events, respond politically to peaceful demonstrators’ long-running social demands and investigate the roots of the violence.

Government faces questions

Traders’ unions said more than 1,500 shops and businesses had been ransacked, with damage costing tens of millions of euros. A Paris shoe-shop owner said: “This had nothing to do with the peaceful protesters. These were organised groups who were breaking things and looting. We'd never seen anything like it.”

Opposition politicians questioned policing tactics and said the state lacked intelligence. Politicians on both the left and right called for Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to resign. They said the government seemed surprised by the scale of the violence and attacks on state buildings, bus stops, roads and shops.

President Emmanuel Macron planned to address the nation on Sunday night. He wrote that there was “no place for violence” in France and said nothing justified the “unbridled violence”. He vowed to punish rioters and vandals, and urged people to distinguish them from protesters.

Macron’s centrist government and Marine Le Pen blamed what they called “ultra-left” groups. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the government wouldn’t be “intimidated” and blamed the unrest on the “ultra-left” and criminals. He called criticism of police leadership “a dangerous and cynical reversal of responsibilities”. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who attended Saturday’s peaceful demonstration in Paris, accused the government of organisational failings that had “opened the door to chaos”.