Around 1,200 people have been arrested and more than 150 police officers injured after nationwide demonstrations in France against the cost of living and the state of schools and public services descended into arson and looting, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said late on Saturday.
Cars were torched in Paris, town halls in Limoges and Marseille were attacked, Lyon's tourism office was set alight and dozens of shops were ransacked as marches in more than 100 towns and cities turned violent. In Saint-Étienne, a protester's hand was severed in an incident that French outlets have linked to a police crowd-control grenade.
Saturday's marches were the largest nationwide mobilisation yet by trade unions and adults in support of a movement that began among secondary-school pupils four weeks ago. They come about six months before a presidential election, with Emmanuel Macron in the final months of his second term.
Lecornu, in a statement backing the police, described what he called "violence of extreme intensity", according to AFP. His arrest figure of around 1,200 supersedes an earlier total of nearly 400 given by the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, who said most of those detained were adults and that further arrests were expected in the coming days.
The interior ministry put the turnout at 550,000 nationally, including 110,000 in Paris, across 110 marches. The CGT, France's largest union federation, said more than 800,000 people had taken part. Neither figure has been independently verified and the two sides have not published their counting methods.
In the capital, police used tear gas and water cannon against masked protesters throwing projectiles and fireworks at Place de la République, AFP and the Associated Press reported. Several parked cars and a newspaper kiosk were set on fire, and a CNN producer saw electric hire bikes burning and a toy shop looted near the start of the march.
Emmanuel Grégoire, the mayor of Paris, said whole streets in the city "have been devastated", according to AFP. In Lille, an Apple store was among the shops looted, the agency reported.
The most serious damage to public buildings was reported in Limoges, where masked protesters set fire to the town hall after torching a police car outside. The region's most senior official told AFP the building was "largely lost". Firefighters were still deployed there late on Saturday.
Marseille's City Hall was also damaged. Benoît Payan, the city's mayor, told BFM TV: "This is unacceptable," while describing the damage as "limited".
In Saint-Étienne, local officials confirmed that a young protester had his hand severed, CBC reported. France 24, citing AFP, attributed the injury to what appeared to be a crowd-control grenade fired by police. The cause has not been officially confirmed and the protester has not been identified.
Nuñez blamed the destruction on the far left. Speaking to reporters, he said vandalism had taken place "at the very clear instigation of the hard left", in remarks translated by AFP, and described opportunistic looting on the fringes of the marches. He offered no evidence for the claim of instigation.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, had said during the afternoon, while the marches were under way, that everything was unfolding peacefully, in a post on X.
Macron has taken a similar line to his interior minister. After the weekly cabinet meeting earlier in the week, the government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon told reporters the president "stressed that young people have legitimate concerns," adding, "but these are being exploited for political purposes and turned into urban violence." Macron has vowed to prosecute and punish those engaging in violence, CBC reported.
The protests grew out of a lycée movement that began in late September after a teachers' strike over staffing and resources, with pupils at a school in Créteil, south-east of Paris, among the first to mobilise. The movement spread through school blockades and, in places, clashes with police. The interior ministry recorded 1,949 arrests on 1 October alone.
In the days before Saturday's marches, calls circulated on social media to revive the "yellow vest" movement of 2018, the Associated Press reported. AP said the demonstrations followed rises in petrol, energy and food prices in recent months.
It is not yet clear how many of the 1,200 arrested have been placed in formal custody or charged, nor how many are minors. The government has not given details of the severity of the police injuries, and there is no official toll of protesters hurt beyond the Saint-Étienne case.
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