Paris drew the cameras on Saturday, but the second weekend of French protests was a national event, and its sharpest clashes outside the capital happened in Marseille, France’s second city. There, youths set fire to rubbish bins to block roads, threw rocks and bottles at security forces, and fired mortar fireworks towards officers, while police said several stores, including two jewellery shops, were ransacked.
Video recorded by French journalists in Marseille showed demonstrators firing green and red mortar fireworks towards police officers as others cheered. The images, widely shared during the day, gave the Marseille unrest a visibility that matched the capital, and they illustrated a pattern the Interior Ministry says repeated across the country.
Beyond Paris
Clashes were reported in Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Lille, Rennes, Nantes and Toulouse, as well as in Paris and Marseille. In Lyon, Bordeaux and Grenoble, confrontations followed the main marches, while police fired tear gas in Clermont-Ferrand, Lille, Nantes and Nice, according to reports of the day.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said that in almost every march, high risk groups broke away from the main body and sought to commit acts of violence, accusing far left activists and criminal gangs of seeking to foment trouble. The ministry counted 410,000 protesters nationwide, while unions put the figure at nearly double that number, and nearly 1,000 people were arrested in total.
A movement in many cities
As Reuters reported, the largely peaceful rallies gave way to clashes as night fell, despite a deployment of 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, 10,000 more than the week before.
The regional spread matters because it shows the movement is not a Paris phenomenon. Protests over living costs, fuel prices and public services drew crowds in cities across France, and the violence that followed them was similarly dispersed. A government that secures Paris but loses control in Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux has not secured the country, and the next weekend will test whether a larger deployment can do what this one could not: keep a national protest peaceful in every city at once.
