France Reports 1,314 Arrests After Protests Over Schools and Living Costs

PARIS – France’s demonstrations over school conditions and rising living costs ended with a sweeping police operation and unresolved questions about injuries to protesters, after largely peaceful marches gave way to clashes in several cities on Saturday. Authorities defended their heavier security deployment as a response to the previous weekend’s violence.

The Interior Ministry said Sunday, October 25, that police had arrested 1,314 people nationwide and that 53 members of the security forces had been injured. Its assessment also recorded responses to 75 fires and the looting of 24 shops. The ministry said several investigations had been opened but did not provide details, according to Le Monde’s account of the figures.

The updated arrest figure replaced Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez’s Saturday-evening estimate of nearly 1,000. It followed another large mobilization by a movement that began with student demands for better schools and broadened into protests over purchasing power, inequality and public services.

The scale of the demonstrations was disputed. The ministry counted approximately 410,000 participants across France, including 110,000 in Paris. The General Confederation of Labor, known as the CGT, estimated national turnout at around 800,000. The competing figures were not reconciled in reporting carried by CBS News.

About 70,000 police officers and gendarmes were deployed nationwide, roughly 20 percent more than the previous Saturday. The government had reinforced security after the October 17 protests brought extensive damage and looting, particularly in the capital. Protecting shops was a central objective of the new operation, Paris police said.

Nuñez said the marches had generally proceeded well before officers confronted violence later in the day. He attributed some of the clashes to groups he described as “ultra-left.” That characterization was the minister’s account, not a description of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the demonstrations.

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In Paris, protesters assembled at Porte d’Italie on the capital’s southeastern edge for an authorized march that ended near Porte de Vincennes. The route had been moved from its originally planned starting point at Bastille. Union representative Murielle Guilbert criticized the restriction on where demonstrators could gather, although participants followed the revised route.

The front of the procession dispersed without incident. Trouble developed later toward the rear, where police said a smaller group confronted officers and sought to damage nearby property. Hélène Denéchère, a spokesperson for Paris police headquarters, told France Inter on Sunday that approximately 500 people whom police identified as rioters had been involved, according to RFI’s report on the operation.

Denéchère said one shop was broken into and robbed, while a car dealership was damaged. Officers intervened at the dealership before people could enter, she said. The account described a more contained episode of commercial damage than the previous weekend, when Paris City Hall recorded damage to 450 shops, including 228 that were looted.

Police also acknowledged shortcomings in their preparations for October 17. Denéchère said authorities had misjudged both the number of people seeking to cause trouble and the intensity of the violence. Saturday’s operation was designed to anticipate confrontations within the march while preventing others from exploiting it to loot businesses.

Outside Paris, police used tear gas during confrontations in several cities. In Nantes, officers also deployed a water cannon after protesters broke through police lines toward the city center; some people on the fringes threw projectiles and directed fireworks at officers, according to reporting carried by CBS News. Clashes and street fires were also reported in Marseille.

Video: October 24 coverage of the Paris demonstration. The footage precedes the Interior Ministry’s updated Sunday arrest tally.

The official tally of injured security personnel did not provide a corresponding nationwide count for protesters. Nuñez said late Saturday that two demonstrators had suffered serious injuries, one in Toulouse and another in Clermont-Ferrand. The omission leaves an important part of the human toll unaccounted for in the ministry’s Sunday assessment.

The Toulouse prefecture told Agence France-Presse that a 20-year-old man had suffered a serious hand injury. Authorities covering Clermont-Ferrand said another man had injured his hand but had not lost any fingers. Those accounts did not establish how the injuries occurred.

A regional newspaper, La Nouvelle République, separately reported that a young man had been injured in the left eye in Poitiers. Its photographer told AFP that the injury occurred during a police charge involving stun grenades and tear gas. The precise cause of that injury, and whether police weapons caused the other reported injuries, had not been established in the reporting available Sunday.

The movement’s demands have outlasted the individual confrontations. Demonstrations began in September with high school students protesting conditions in schools in the Paris suburbs, then drew people demanding relief from rising living costs. Saturday’s largely peaceful daytime marches reflected that wider constituency, even as the government’s response increasingly centered on preventing another night of damage.

Yellow Vests organizers have called for further demonstrations on October 31, including rallies and sit-ins outside parliament and city halls. They accused President Emmanuel Macron’s government of an “authoritarian drift” and urged supporters to defend public freedoms. Meanwhile, the ministry’s arrest total did not establish how many people would face charges, and its injury assessment still offered no comprehensive count of wounded demonstrators.