Monday briefing: What you need to know about a weekend of ‘chaos’ in France

Good morning. I bet your weekend was better than Emmanuel Macron’s. On Friday, the evening before mass protests that were planned across France, he attended a Céline Dion concert in Paris with his wife, Brigitte, prompting comparisons to Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. On Sunday evening, he was forced to give a televised speech condemning the “unbridled violence” and riots that erupted in French cities over the weekend.

The rioters that burned makeshift barricades of bicycles in Paris, destroyed the steeple of Limoges’ town hall and set fire to Lyon’s tourism office were described as “LE CHAOS” on the front page of La Tribune Dimanche, and “SCENES D’INSURRECTION” on Le Parisien Dimanche. By Sunday, protests had also taken place in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

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In the early hours of Sunday, cleaners started to remove the detritus from Parisian streets: shards of glass from broken shop windows, smashed bus shelters, burned out cars. The smell of teargas still lingered in the Métro station at Place de la République. “Areas of Paris looked like a wasteland,” Paolo Stuppia , a sociologist at Sciences Po in Paris, tells me. About 855 people have been arrested in Paris, and a total of 2,400 have been arrested across France. Lamia El Aaraje, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris, said the capital had experienced a level of violence “we had never seen before.”

There have been so many incredible images of destruction (see our gallery here ) that it’s possible to forget Saturday was, for the most part, defined by peaceful protests. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them schoolchildren and parents, joined marches across the country. A far smaller group of protesters, many wearing face masks, smashed street furniture and torched cars and bus stops. A third group took the opportunity to loot shops. “I saw teenagers running off with shoeboxes, clothes, and perfume,” Angelique Chrisafis , the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, tells me.

It’s the second group that has dominated the headlines. On Saturday afternoon, people set the town hall in Limoges alight (its spire collapsed dramatically on Saturday evening), and broke into the city hall in Marseille. “It wasn’t as if the peaceful protesters suddenly turned violent,” Chrisafis says. “It was as if the government didn’t have a hold on the situation, and suddenly, the police were really caught off guard.”

The peaceful protesters ‘Our future is being stolen from us’

When a small number of people break the law during otherwise peaceful protests, there’s a tendency to condemn such acts as “criminality, pure and simple” (to quote David Cameron during the 2011 London riots), and to disqualify the idea they represent a form of antagonism against authority. “If everything was going well in France, you wouldn’t have young kids ransacking stores,” Stuppia says.

Such criminal acts can also become a means of undermining peaceful protesters. “Some of those people are now pretty upset because they believe the government will be talking about burning barricades rather than the fact they turned out in such large numbers,” Chrisafis says. French students have been protesting against the school system since September and calling for repairs to decrepit buildings, smaller class sizes, and reforms to a widely loathed university admissions system. Education is a particularly fraught subject in France, where academic credentials overwhelmingly determine job prospects. But their concerns are also broader; as Greta Thunberg put it recently, “our future is being stolen from us,” a feeling that many young people across the continent share.

The student protests have since become the focus in a constellation of different issues, ranging from the cost of living to rising fuel prices and public service cuts. Those on Saturday drew in numerous groups, including unions and supporters of the Gilets Jaunes. “Gen-Z is really facing a polycrisis of different issues, from the climate crisis to the rise of the far right and the use of AI” Stuppia tells me. “And you can see the same set of issues coming alive in Italy, in Belgium, in Portugal, and with the Cockroach protests in India. Young people want change.” (You can read more about how these protests have spread to other European countries in this story by Sam Jones ).

The police response has been at once strikingly brutal and remarkably inept. As Guardian columnist Rokhaya Diallo pointed out in this recent opinion piece , French schoolchildren have been “treated like enemies to be crushed” over the last few weeks. French lawyers have said that several teenagers have suffered “war-like” injuries from police, including a 14-year-old boy who suffered a fractured jaw and a 15-year-old whose hand was blown off in an explosion involving a police stun grenade. The number of arrests has also been disproportionate: according to this graph by Pierre Bataille, a sociologist at Grenoble Alpes university, more people were arrested during two weeks of the student protests than members of the Gilets Jaunes were in an entire year.

The shortcomings of this zealous focus on student protesters became clear on Saturday afternoon. Crowd psychologists have demonstrated that rather than instilling order, heavy-handed policing can actually trigger violence. While the police blocked a demonstration route between Place de la République and Place de la Concorde on Saturday citing “serious risks of public disorder,” large sections of Paris were left without enough officers to prevent looting. According to the French Green leader Marine Tondelier, “entire cities were left to the mercy of rioters, while peaceful protesters were subjected to violence.” She has since been calling for the resignation of Laurent Nuñez, chief of staff of the Paris police, calling his performance over the weekend “an absolute disaster”.

In his statement last night , Macron drew a distinction between protesters with “legitimate demands” and “those who destroyed, smashed, and looted”, and criticised “factious groups from the ultra-left, joined by numerous delinquents” (pending an investigation, though, it’s impossible to say what the rioters’ motivations were). There are tricky and enduring questions that his government now faces. It failed to anticipate both the student protests that have engulfed France since September, and the violence that broke out over the weekend. As this interesting New Yorker piece (£) points out Macron’s experience of the public education system is limited, and even his education minister has admitted that at least some of his five children attend private schools.

The protests and the police response have underscored how out of touch Macron’s government appears to be with French people, many of whom are angry about the price of fuel and the cost of living. This sense of disaster – described by the mayor of Limoges, Guillaume Guérin, a member of the conservative Les Républicains party, as a “colossal failure of the state” – has overshadowed the thousands of people who turned out for peaceful protests, and plays into the hands of the far right (Marine Le Pen, who gave her own address on X before Macron’s, has described the riots as a “threat to democracy”). In a recent interview with Le Monde, the mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, struck a more dispassionate tone, and said there need to be “concrete, political answers” to “the social unrest shaking our country.”

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Fuente: The Guardian World