PARIS — Business is up tenfold at a weapons store near Place de l’Opéra in Paris: Shopkeepers from all over the city have been stocking up on pepper spray and tear gas. In the nine days since riots erupted in cities across France, thousands of merchants have also boarded up their storefronts, radically altering the Paris streetscape. The screech of electric saws and pounding of nails into plywood are now background noise in the French capital.
Adding to the dark mood are police helicopters hovering, with searchlights blazing, to enforce a late-night curfew in the Les Halles and République sections of Paris. And the city has removed many of the huge street-corner bins where Parisians are accustomed to dropping their empty wine and beer bottles. Rioters had been knocking them over to get glass ammunition against police.
Yet daily life has barely changed in much of Paris, where it can seem like normal times amid the chaos. Friends chat in cafés with shattered windows. Customers ignore plywood covering the front doors of shops.
But the social and economic grievances that boiled over so violently have not gone away, and nobody can escape the dreaded question: What’s next? More demonstrations, for sure, and a strike planned for Nov. 5, which has left many resigned to toggling, for now, between upheaval and ordinary life. At Cycles Laurent, a bike store on Boulevard Voltaire, a makeshift wooden window doubles as a spray-painted sign urging people to come on in.
The bike shop is one of more than 3,000 businesses attacked or pillaged in France in the aftermath of giant protests against the government of President Emmanuel Macron the weekend of Oct. 17. Although a tense urban peace has taken hold since then, many residents of Paris, Toulouse, Marseille and other cities beset by riots still feel under siege, much like Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. Scattered curfews and a police surge to keep nationwide protests under control have helped to stop the looting.
More than 400,000 protesters returned to the streets on Saturday, by the police count; closer to double that number, according to unions. Apart from a few tear-gas skirmishes, the demonstrations ended peacefully. The unrest began after high school students took to the streets last month to denounce poor conditions and resources at their campuses.
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