Awa, 18, stood in the dock in the tribunal de Paris, a small, mute and bewildered figure seeming unable to understand, let alone answer, the simplest of questions. The court was told she had joined young people who looted an Yves Saint Laurent store on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris’s Left Bank late on Sunday and stripped it bare within minutes. Awa was arrested at a nearby Metro station with a black balaclava and black gloves in her backpack along with four YSL handbags worth a total of €5,000.
In the dock, dressed entirely in black - the clothes she was wearing when arrested two days earlier - she appeared panicked, clutched at her hair, picked her lip. Unable to speak, she covered her face and began to weep; first silently, then uncontrollably, her sobs punctuating an almost palpably painful silence. Awa was just one of 2,500 people arrested during last weekend’s rioting and looting across the country, more than 900 of whom are being fast-tracked through the courts using a procedure called comparution immédiate (immediate appearance).
It sends them to trial straight or shortly after being taken into custody, or within three days if they are held in pretrial detention. The process of handling this sudden influx of cases has overwhelmed the courts and angered defendants’ lawyers, who say they have no time to meet with clients. The violence erupted after high-school student and union demonstrations.
In Paris, the authorised march passed through the capital without major incident. But on the fringes and afterwards, black-clad, masked people rampaged through cities and towns, setting fire to public buildings, bikes and rubbish bins, smashing up restaurants and shops, and looting local and luxury goods stores. Initial reports blamed the destruction on those protesting against a raft of unaddressed grievances against President Emmanuel Macron and successive governments, including “ultra-left” disrupters spurred on by the France Unbowed leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The reality was, in many cases, more prosaic. Most of those charged with vandalism, violence, theft, or damaging public or private property appeared to have been what officials have described as “opportunistic delinquents” with mundane rather than political motivations. The majority were young men.
In Paris, 68% of those taken into custody were adults, according to the public prosecutor’s office, not high-school teenagers. As police escorted the defendants into court from the cells where they had been held since their arrest, it was clear that, apart from black clothing, they could not be categorised. Some were confused, others more confident.
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