By admin “We should stay inside tomorrow,” my boyfriend said on Friday, October 16. While I’d been cleaning up after a dinner party we’d hosted for a friend visiting Paris, he’d been watching social media videos saying that Saturday, October 17, would be unlike any other demonstration day in France, a country that sees many. Student demonstrators, who have protested poor learning conditions since mid-September, would join gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests), who have protested rising costs of living since 2018, as well as farm, trade, and labor union members, climate change activists, and others to mount the largest demonstration France has seen in years.
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By the end of the weekend, 800,000 protesters had taken to France’s streets, according to organizers (550,000, according to the interior ministry); 3,000 businesses had been looted, vandalized, or destroyed; over 1,000 police officers and demonstrators injured; and more than 2,500 individuals arrested.
Our neighborhood, near Place de la République, was the epicenter of violence in Paris. Over 24 hours, I was wrenched between hope—glimpses of goodwill among strangers—and desperation as the potential of people moved to action by legitimate concerns was engulfed by uncontrolled destruction. Many French and international media outlets have made a vital distinction, given what I witnessed, between most people who protested peacefully and a minority who sought out, or were swept up in, violence.
As the scale of the damage became clear, I was left with questions. Where were the police who had tear-gassed peaceful protesters near our apartment when stores on our street were being looted? How should peaceful demonstrators engage with those marching alongside them who are past the point of negotiating, or with the other group—not protesters at all—who use social movements as cover for criminality or chaos? What should citizens do when government dismisses their protests or responds undemocratically? This week, the French investigative outlet Mediapart reported that French intelligence officials were instructed to blame the far-left La France Insoumise party for the violence. French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez denied the allegations but added that “the link between LFI and certain fringe groups is real.”
I don’t have good answers to my questions, nor, it seems, do local authorities, who are demanding answers from the Élysée themselves. “For the first time, we were left with the distinct impression that entire sections of our cities had been left completely unprotected,” mayors Emmanuel Grégoire of Paris, Benoît Payan of Marseille, and Grégory Doucet of Lyon wrote in a Libération editorial on Monday. “Even though this date had been specifically flagged and the mobilization anticipated, the security measures in place were quickly overwhelmed.”
What has unfolded in France this week follows a depressingly familiar pattern. Vast numbers of citizens, spurred by warranted grievances, took to the streets to exercise their right to protest with broad support from the surrounding public. Those protesters were met by police, who not only cracked down on peaceful participants, but failed to deploy against criminals who predictably took advantage of the demonstrations to pillage, plunder, and vandalize. Press coverage of the day overwhelmingly focused on newsworthy violence and destruction, suggesting that the protests themselves “spiraled” into riots. Political actors then used widespread disorder to advance their agendas and delegitimize peaceful protests.
This progression is playing out now following the events of October 17, a day of protest attended by students, teachers, health care workers, grandparents, children, pensioners, public-sector employees, and innumerable other peaceful French citizens.
Recognizing the pattern didn’t make watching it repeat first-hand any less crushing.
On Saturday morning, Tasha, our friend visiting from my small California hometown, took convincing to get outside. Before her trip, her father had sent her student protest coverage featuring bins and bikes on fire. “It’s nothing like that out there, usually,” I coaxed, recounting the student protest I’d attended the week before. She acquiesced, and we strolled around the Place de la République—two blocks from our door—where marchers were assembling.
République is a frequent gathering place for demonstrations. As part of civic planner Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century transformation of Paris, the square was designed with a policing mind: wide avenues gave soldiers easy access to working-class suburbs east of the city. But today, the surrounding 10th arrondissement is gentrifying; those same boulevards offer protesters grand marching routes; and a towering statue of Marianne—the symbol of the French Republic—sits atop it all, providing symbolic value to civic demonstrations.
In the hours before the 2:00 p.m. start time, the quartier buzzed with vendors set up for the regularly scheduled flea market on our street, residents on typical Saturday outings, and demonstrators pouring in. Standing on a bridge above Canal Saint-Martin, we watched art students wheel a massive Trojan Horse float they’d built en route to République. Wearing Ancient Greek-style gold helmets with red mohawks, accompanied by a marching band and hundreds of demonstrators, young and old alike, some smiled up at us, yelling “Rejoignez-nous !” (“Join us!”)
It was moving. “The kids care about things,” Tasha said. “That guy looks like he’s going to shop at the North Coast Co-op,” I observed, pointing to a man with long white hair in overalls carrying a tote, referencing our local hippie foods store in California.
On the square at République, speakers blasted “The Hanging Tree,” the battle anthem from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series, used in the popular movies over scenes of citizens rising up against their murderous government.
I explained that, in student protests in the weeks prior, I’d seen signs that read “If we burn, you burn with us”—the slogan of resistance in Collins’s fictional Panem; the use here, I said, didn’t seem to de-escalate the situation. But, I added, neither officers of the compagnies républicaines de sécurité (French national police deployed for crowd and riot control), who have drawn criticism for violence against protesters, nor French President Emmanuel Macron’s administration, which has drawn criticism for its perceived dismissive treatment of protests, seem adept at de-escalation either.
More than an hour before the march’s official start, L’Orchestre du Nouveau Monde played “The Hanging Tree” live as police deployed tear gas. The conductor, blinking against the gas, kept conducting.
Stepping slowly amidst tens of thousands of other bodies, Tasha and I discussed protest in France versus the United States. “What would happen if Americans turned out like this when we felt our government wasn’t delivering?” I asked. “It feels so different to be in a crowd in a country where citizens don’t carry guns,” she said. Parents carried kids on their shoulders. Two more bands marched by. People leaned out from the apartments above Boulevard de Magenta to cheer the demonstration, and demonstrators cheered them back. Police blocked the streets parallel to the route, and as far as I saw, no marchers engaged them.
On our way home a couple of hours later, we learned that the situation at République had devolved: Police lobbed grenades and tear gas at masked, black-clad individuals, who were lobbing fireworks and other projectiles at officers. As we arrived at our door, having never been in a war zone, I’d guess it sounded like a lower-volume version.
From our apartment, we watched as a crowd of black-clad people—a subset of the projectile-lobbers, we assumed—ran down our street, tear gas billowing behind them. We expected police to be right on their heels, but no officers followed. The runners stopped, turned, piled Dott and Lime e-bikes in our street next to still-standing flea market stalls, and set the barricade of bicycles ablaze. One person began dragging a table from a vendor’s stall toward the inferno before another stopped him and put it back in its proper place.
When others targeted the trash and recycling bins on our street, a man on the balcony of a second-floor apartment aimed his garden hose at the burning receptacles. Another went downstairs with a fire extinguisher to address the bin head-on. Other second-floor neighbors across the way threw what appeared to be canapés down to the people below and poured wine into one of their mouths.
The police never came, but when firefighters arrived, protesters cleared the way for their trucks—moving bins and bikes they’d thrown down behind them, presumably to slow a police advance—and clapped. French firefighters have protested independently and alongside other public sector workers for more pay, resources, staff, and engines over the last couple of months.
While they extinguished the blaze on our street, others burned nearby. We went downstairs to the same bridge where we’d seen art students march a few hours earlier, watching firefighters tackle blazes on either side of the canal. As a crowd of around 50 similarly black-clad individuals began to pound the glass storefronts of Yesss Electrique, a chain home electricity and plumbing store, and ice cream shop, and we realized that we were witness to looting, Tasha pointed out the obvious: “They’re all men.” (Or, more accurately, judging by some of their physiques, men and boys.) “Look, a female looter, there’s one!” another friend said. After they shattered the glass, one young man stripped down and dove into the canal for no apparent reason. “He’s going to regret that,” we said. It was cold outside.
We stood watching for at least half an hour as Yesss Electrique was pillaged. There too, we never saw police arrive.
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“We need to understand how scenes of looting could, in some instances, continue for more than thirty minutes without any police intervention,” the mayors of Paris, Marseille, and Lyon wrote in their Libération editorial.
The normalcy of what other neighbors and we did that evening stuck with me: We took an evening walk. People jogged, circumnavigating heaps of charred rubble and active fires in their athletic shoes. On the bridge, surrounded by other bystanders, we smelled marijuana to our left. “Who would want to be stoned right now?” Tasha asked. Hearing her, the smoker replied: “This is going to go all night.”
We went home and watched on social media as it went all night—occasionally leaning out our window to assess the situation, then closing it against the fumes of burning e-bike batteries.
We later learned that those who committed violence seem to span from criminally to politically to momentarily motivated. Social media supercharged the situation, amplifying tensions by spreading viral videos of violence, and French and European Union (EU) authorities are investigating the role of disinformation and foreign influence in that dissemination.
As the sun rose Sunday morning, I surveyed the damage. Our street’s Franprix, a chain convenience store, was looted. Outside the Yesss Electrique we’d watched get rocked, three men swept its shattered storefront off the street, passers-by pausing to talk to them. Burned cars and bikes littered the streets. Concrete and cobblestones had been dug up (we assumed to smash storefronts or hurl at law enforcement) and left in piles or strewn arbitrarily. I saw newsstands incinerated, businesses smashed and plundered, good Samaritans plucking debris and broken bits of stone from the water surrounding the graffitied statue of Marianne.
I was relieved that the Cork and Cavan, an Irish pub across the canal, and my favorite in all of Paris, seemed to have only minor damage. But La Barrique, our neighborhood tabac—a combination tobacco/lotto shop-café-restaurant you’ll find across France—where I’d had my first beer as a 10th arrondissement resident, was devastated.
Later that day, I saw a video on social media of the owner, Aline Li, a Chinese immigrant, speaking to ITV News. “A life of work,” she cried, her eye black and swollen. I choked up. The numbness, shock, and adrenaline I’d felt much of the day before were gone, replaced by swells of sympathy and sorrow—and the questions we discussed over the days to come. “The luxury stores, the chain groceries, they’ll be alright, but how could people not care about the small businesses?” asked I, the daughter of a bar owner.
While we care about our neighborhood and its business owners, to many, our quartier in Paris proper—the cleanliness of its streets, the quality of its schools, the convenience of its public transport—is a physical incarnation of an outsized share of government attention on affluent physical spaces and the people that inhabit them, we mused.
Some people are angry, others nihilistic, and many behave irrationally in the anonymity and solidarity of a crowd (or brothers in arms), we mused further. In Pau, a city in southwest France, a middle-aged delivery driver with no criminal record said he threw projectiles at police on impulse after officers deployed tear gas, according to Radio France Internationale (RFI). Two 20- and 21-year-old friends arrested in Paris said they’d looted whiskey bottles from a store to celebrate one of their birthdays, The New York Times reported, although what judges found in messages they reviewed on the defendants’ phones contradicted their statement somewhat: “We will loot everything,” one had written on Snapchat.
French politicians and international media have commenced finger-pointing this week: Jordan Bardella, president of France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party and protégé of RN presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, said the violence proved that France must halt immigration. Donald Trump blamed “migrants, jihadists and communists.”
In truth, besides the obvious—that the vast majority of the people arrested were men—we don’t know much about the demographics of those responsible. In adhering to its “color-blind” model of governance, the French government doesn’t collect data on race, ethnicity, or religion as we do in America. So blaming immigrants is not only factually unfounded, but especially cruel, considering that immigrants own or staff many of the businesses that were looted or destroyed. In France, foreign-born residents are slightly more likely to be self-employed than native-born citizens, and in Paris’s renowned cafés and restaurants, half of the chefs and kitchen staff hail from outside the EU.
Hassan Rashdu, an immigrant from Bangladesh and the owner of an electronics store hit in my neighborhood, worked as a waiter in France for years while saving to start his business. Now, “there’s nothing left,” he told Euronews. I frequent Rashdu’s shop because it serves as our quartier’s postal drop-off point; we pick up packages there.
Macron, in his address to the nation on Sunday night, faulted “ultra-left” activists for Saturday’s violence, and there is some evidence backing that: A subset of those arrested could be described as such, and were “largely known to the police and justice system,” RFI reported.
Still, Macron’s government had more than adequate notice that Saturday’s demonstrations would be extraordinarily large—social media had been telling us as much for weeks—and that vandals and thieves might make use of the gathering. It happens so frequently that the French have a term for such people: “casseurs,” those who use public demonstrations to engage in property destruction, looting, and violence against law enforcement. So where were the police when the casseurs were allowed to run wild? Why did I see more officers lining the side streets of a peaceful protest than at any other time of day? Where were they as my tabac of choice burned?
My mayor would like to know the same: “What security forces were deployed that day? How and where did they intervene? Where were they positioned, and how did their deployment evolve throughout the day? What doctrine for intervention had been established?” he, along with the mayors of Marseille and Lyon, asked in their editorial. Le Monde’s editorial board blamed the government’s strategic failures for Saturday’s losses.
French residents have been protesting en masse what they see as Macron’s policy failures for most of his two terms; high school students, for over a month now. On the day of the demonstrators’ largest showing in years, another Macron administration failure allowed violence to become the story, the purpose of the peaceful protests a footnote, and harsher law enforcement its conclusion.
American cities have seen this series of unfortunate events before. In 1999, during anti-globalization protests surrounding the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, for example, police arrested peaceful demonstrators, residents who weren’t protesting, and failed to prevent property damage by a destructive minority. More recently, some politicians—Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, among them—used the violence that accompanied the 2020 protests following the death of George Floyd in cities across the United States to cast the entirety of the Black Lives Matter movement as radical, and participants as “terrorists,” “anarchists,” and “thugs.”
This pattern has also played out repeatedly in France. Over the course of October, Macron’s ministers took to describing the high schoolers’ protest movement as “urban violence”—a term that falsely implies the majority of participants are criminals to be met with tear gas and stun grenades, rather than peaceful teenagers requesting improvements to the education system. Le Monde’s editorial board also held the Macron administration responsible for “disregarding” high schoolers’ protests.
This week, Macron’s administration imposed curfews, bans on gatherings, fast-tracked prosecutions—including of minors—and harsher sentences for those prosecuted. In an open letter, 125 lawyers criticized the justice minister’s call “to be extremely firm, to be ruthless” in punishing vandals, looters, and rioters. “The nationwide protest on 17 October revealed to us, as lawyers, a historic, politically motivated, orchestrated, and deliberate crackdown,” they wrote, denouncing “the ultra-repressive turn taken by the Paris public prosecutor’s office.” The delivery driver in Pau was sentenced to four months in prison; the whiskey looters in Paris, suspended prison sentences of six to eight months each.
“What should we have done?” I asked on Sunday, thinking of the hundreds of people, us included, who had stood by and watched. Should we have thrown ourselves between amped-up men and La Barrique? Next time, do we guard the Cork and Cavan, ensuring the safety of our neighborhood pub with smiles and a “please not this one, it’s a neighborhood staple”? I’ve come to think we shouldn’t have to. That’s what taxpayer-funded police are for.
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