Chaos threatens to take over France, as shown by the new night of revolt on Thursday, much more serious than the previous ones, with the multiplication of fires and looting throughout the country. The 40,000 police and gendarmes deployed, including elite units, were unable to control the spread of violence over such a vast geographical area.
Law enforcement tried to protect vital buildings, albeit with fairly partial success, and it was impossible for them to prevent looting because businesses are even more vulnerable. The feeling of helplessness was obvious. According to the latest report, 875 people were arrested and 249 police officers were injured. The vehicles burned on the public road were about 2,000. There were at least 77 police premises attacked and 119 public buildings, including schools, libraries and municipal facilities.
A 19-year-old man died yesterday as a result of the injuries he sustained when he fell, on Wednesday night, from the roof of a shopping center near Rouen. The prosecutor's office is investigating the circumstances of the case.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, yesterday asked the prefects to order the tram and bus companies to stop operating from 9pm. It was a kind of undeclared curfew. For the first time, the heaviest armored vehicles available to the French Gendarmerie took to the streets.
The Head of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, sent a circular to the courts in which he requested a "quick, firm and systematic" criminal response to urban violence committed by minors, with consequences for parents.
Faced with the seriousness of the situation, President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Brussels to participate in the European Council, returned early to Paris to participate in a new crisis meeting with a small group of ministers at the Elysée. At the end of the meeting, the head of state considered "unacceptable" what France has experienced in recent nights. "Nothing justifies violence", he said, and regretted that the death of young Nahel in Nanterre had been "instrumentalised". "I call on all parents to take responsibility," Macron continued, referring to the involvement of many minors in the riots. The president announced that he would ask that "the most sensitive content" be removed from social networks and spoke with concern of a phenomenon of "intoxication" of young people by social networks and a "mimicry of violence". He promised that more measures will be taken and more means will be used, but he did not mention the possibility of declaring a state of emergency, as demanded by the right.
Hours later, Marine Le Pen, former presidential candidate of the National Reunification (RN, extreme right) asked Macron to receive her at the Elysée.
Acts of vandalism, committed in effect by groups of young people between the ages of 14 and 18, affected many cities. One of the most serious was the fire of 12 buses, which were completely burnt, in a parking lot of the Paris urban transport company (RATP) in Aubervilliers, a suburb of the northern periphery. Former Prime Minister Jean Castex, who now runs the company, visited the site to find out about the wreckage. In Roubaix, near the border with Belgium, several buildings burned down. In the center of Paris, a large store of a multinational sporting goods store, located in the shopping center of Les Halles, and another of the Spanish giant of clothing stores, Zara, on rue Rivoli, were looted. A group of ten soldiers from the anti-terrorist Sentinelle operative, in defensive formation, with automatic weapons in hand, were patrolling this street yesterday at noon.
The material damage caused so far by the protests is counted for many millions of euros. The list of affected cities is long: Marseille, Lille, Besançon, Pau, Montauban, Rennes, Lyon, Toulouse, as well as numerous satellite towns of Paris.
The Government's great concern is that the great crisis of the autumn of 2005 will be repeated, a revolt of the extraradio that lasted for almost a month and forced the declaration of a state of emergency. Then, the detonator was the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted in an electrical installation when they tried to escape from a police control.
The mayor of Évry - the municipality that Manuel Valls led for years, south of Paris -, Stéphane Beaudet, emphasized yesterday, in an interview with the BFM-TV channel, that, compared to 2005, there are two substantial differences: the power of cell phones and social media, which accelerate events and often exacerbate them, and the lack of real political consensus among parties to quell the revolt. Beaudet was referring to the strength of the radical options, be it the extreme right or the radical left. The first stokes the fire with the constant message against immigration. The radical left, on the contrary, minimizes violence and justifies it, while lashing out at the police.
There are sectors that criticize Macron for the first statements after the death of Nahel. Some criticize him for not respecting the separation of powers and the presumption of innocence of the police and for proceeding to the conclusion of justice.
The president's attitude has exasperated some police unions. A note made public yesterday by the unions Alliance and UNSA provoked an acid response from left-wing leaders Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Tondelier, who saw in it a "threat of sedition" and a "call for civil war". The two unions, which are in the majority, assured that it is necessary to "prevail before 'these savage hordes', since "it is not enough to ask for calm". According to the note, the police "can no longer suffer the dictates of violent minorities". "Today the police are in combat because we are at war - the union text concluded. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the Government will have to be aware of it".
For Mélenchon and Tondelier, the tone of the statement is unacceptable. They interpreted it as "a barely concealed threat of a fascist coup". "France has been held hostage for years by the violent police lobbies that terrorize everyone, even the leadership of the State".
The atmosphere is so tense that two plainclothes police were assaulted in Marseille. The two officers, who were in a vehicle, were blocked by some burning garbage containers. When they got out of the car, a group of about twenty individuals attacked them after discovering that they were police. One suffered trauma to an eye and a knife cut to the wrist. The other had to be hospitalized for head trauma.
A collateral damage of the revolt has been the sudden worsening of air quality in the Paris region, due to the massive burning of vehicles and garbage containers. In both cases, there is a lot of plastic which causes a very black and toxic dense smoke when it is set on fire. The regional air quality observatory, Airparif, detected a significant concentration of fine particles, PM2.5 and P10, especially in the west and northeast. This pollution was added to that caused recently in this area of France by the effects, although milder, of forest fires in Canada.
