PARIS — Riot police fired tear gas and water cannon into crowds along Paris's grand boulevards on Saturday as a day of protest over the cost of living spiraled into arson, looting and street battles across France, leaving more than 1,200 people under arrest and a historic town hall roof in ashes.
More than half a million people joined demonstrations nationwide, according to the BBC, as a two-month-old student movement over crumbling, understaffed secondary schools fused with trade unions and a broader revolt against fuel and food prices. By nightfall, cars were burning at the Place de la République, shops had been ransacked in Paris and Lille, and fire crews were battling a blaze that collapsed part of the roof of the town hall in Limoges.
Clashes spread from the capital to the provinces
In the capital, riot squads charged crowds and struck protesters with batons as skirmishes stretched into the evening. Looters raided clothing and food shops in Paris, while an Apple store in Lille was broken into and emptied, officials and witnesses said. Footage authenticated by BBC Verify showed masked men driving a tourist train through central Grenoble toward police lines, and fighting broke out between rival groups of demonstrators in the capital. Authorities also reported damage to buildings in Grenoble, Avignon, Pau, Montpellier and Valence. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said 150 police officers were injured in the unrest, on top of scores of protesters and bystanders treated for injuries ranging from tear-gas exposure to baton strikes.
The disorder capped weeks of escalating confrontation. Hundreds of thousands of students have marched since September over staff shortages and dilapidated facilities in France's lycées, the secondary schools serving 15- to 18-year-olds; by early October nearly 400 schools had been disrupted or blockaded nationwide, with officials tallying thousands of arrests and hundreds of injuries among students, teachers and police over the course of that earlier, separate wave of unrest, according to Morocco World News. The government's one concession so far — Education Minister Édouard Geffray's pledge of 3,000 extra supply teachers on October 8 — did little to slow the movement, which has since been bolstered by the CGT union, the French Communist Party and other groups angry over a draft budget that freezes welfare benefits and public-sector pay even as fuel and grocery prices keep climbing.
The economic backdrop has sharpened the anger. France's government is attempting to narrow a budget deficit that has ballooned past European Union limits, through a mix of spending freezes and tax measures that unions say fall hardest on workers and students rather than on corporations or the wealthy. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, and polling cited by French media has shown deepening pessimism about living standards even as headline inflation has eased from its post-pandemic peak.
A fragile government braces for more
Ahead of the march, Lecornu made clear he expected the worst, telling reporters at a briefing in Paris earlier in the week that the country was gripped by a moment of exhaustion.
Est-ce qu'on redoute de la violence ? Oui.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu — "Are we afraid of violence? Yes."
The unrest lands at a delicate political moment. President Emmanuel Macron is due to leave office next year, and polls suggest the April presidential election could come down to a run-off between National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise — a dynamic Lecornu has accused rivals of trying to turn into electoral fuel. Lecornu himself is France's fifth prime minister in two years, a run of turnover that has left successive governments with little political capital to negotiate with an angry and fragmented street movement. With parliament fractured and no majority for further austerity measures, the government has few levers left to calm the streets before voting begins.
No new concessions were announced Saturday night. The government is expected to face renewed pressure in the National Assembly this week, where opposition lawmakers from both the far left and far right have called for Lecornu's resignation over his handling of the protests. Union leaders, meanwhile, signaled the movement is far from over, with further strikes and school blockades already being planned for the coming weeks as France heads deeper into what Lecornu himself conceded is becoming a season of near-permanent unrest.
