PARIS — Two large sections of central Paris were shut down in a curfew Monday night as France was reeling from a weekend of nationwide rioting and looting that left much of the country stupefied by the scarcity of police in some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods. Grocery stores, clothing shops, cafés, health clinics and public buildings were ransacked in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux and other cities. Overwhelmed police forces often failed to intervene as thousands of vandals, many wearing masks and caps that hid their faces, shattered storefront windows and walked off with merchandise.
Crowds of young adults set cars, electric bikes and trash cans on fire. A patchwork of blazing barricades blocked traffic on many Paris streets and shrouded nearby buildings in black smoke. What began last week with peaceful protests by high school students demanding better conditions in schools beset by overcrowding and decrepit facilities has morphed into roiling protests nationwide denouncing rising living costs and inequities in French society.
More than 500,000 people took to the streets Saturday and although most marched peacefully, others rampaged and began looting. The violence has left many in France with a sense that their nation was unraveling with a deeply unpopular president struggling to manage a growing debt crisis amid extreme social and political divisions. In a televised speech from the Élysée Palace as looting was resuming on Sunday evening, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the nation’s “anger and shame,” saying he had ordered his government to “draw every lesson” from its handling of the violence.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who conceded Monday that police had “lost control” of some big cities, offered his resignation, but Macron declined to accept it. With Macron’s 10 years as president coming to an end next spring, the violence has left many in France with a sense that their nation was coming apart at the seams with a deeply unpopular president struggling to manage a growing debt crisis amid extreme social and political divisions. The leading candidate to succeed Macron in the presidential election next spring is Marine Le Pen, who would be the first far-right leader of France since the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II.
She has pledged a restoration of public order, along with a crackdown on immigration and a halt to French aid to Ukraine. On Monday, authorities imposed an 11 p.m. curfew on the République and Les Halles sections of Paris, both of them ravaged by looting over the weekend. Curfews were also declared in Lyon, Nice, Lille and other cities.
France is not the only European to experience unrest in recent days. Violent protests have broken out in Italy and Albania. Rising housing costs triggered demonstrations this year in Spain and Portugal.
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