Nearly 1,000 arrested as French cost-of-living protests turn violent

Nearly 1,000 people were arrested across France on Saturday after a largely peaceful day of mass protests over living costs and school conditions gave way to clashes with police in several cities.

The Interior Ministry estimated that 410,000 people joined the demonstrations; unions put the figure at about 800,000. Authorities deployed roughly 70,000 security personnel and imposed restrictions in several cities, seeking to prevent a repeat of the rioting and looting that followed protests a week earlier.

In Paris, clashes broke out at the end of a march from Porte d’Italie toward Porte de Vincennes. Some protesters erected makeshift barricades and threw projectiles, while police used tear gas and water cannon. Officers also charged masked youths who were smashing windows at a car dealership. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said “several thousand radical activists” had gathered at the back of the march, including about 500 people identified as rioters, according to the BBC, citing AFP.

Police also used tear gas in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes, Al Jazeera reported. In Marseille, rubbish bins burned and metal sheets blocked streets. In Bordeaux, people pulled boards from a building to make a barricade. A protester in Lyon said police fired tear gas almost immediately after a group gathered in an area declared off-limits: “You could barely see anything in the street.”

Nunez said two people were seriously injured, one in Toulouse and another in Clermont-Ferrand. Al Jazeera reported that the person injured in Toulouse was a man whose fingers were reportedly blown off. The minister said the arrest count, already close to 1,000 late Saturday, would rise.

Nunez described the violence faced by police as “extremely elevated,” according to Al Jazeera, but called the day’s outcome more “positive” than the previous weekend because of quicker interventions, checks before demonstrations and stronger protection of commercial areas. Officials said they had so far avoided disorder on the scale seen a week earlier.

A Paris protester who gave her name as Zelie told the BBC that people were “really frustrated” and had been “suffering a lot” since President Emmanuel Macron took office. “Today we are in the streets because it’s been too long, it’s been too much,” she said. One of two masked teenage protesters interviewed by the BBC condemned looting but linked it to poverty and police violence. Rights advocates and protesters also criticized the security response as a threat to the freedom to demonstrate, Al Jazeera reported.

Macron had decreed earlier in the week that only demonstrations organized by recognized trade unions would be permitted, according to the BBC. Hundreds of people have been jailed after fast-track hearings over vandalism, arson and looting.

Last weekend’s protests drew about 550,000 people, the BBC reported. It put the subsequent arrests at more than 2,500, while Al Jazeera gave a figure of 2,700. More than 2,000 businesses were directly affected, and France’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry estimated damage in the hundreds of millions of euros, according to the BBC.

The demonstrations continue six months before France’s presidential election.