A fourth weekend of antigovernment protests turned violent on Saturday, with demonstrators in Paris ripping down barricades from store fronts and setting vehicles on fire, while riot police fired tear gas and water cannons to control the crowds, reports The New York Times.
The so-called Yellow Vests descended on the capital by the thousands, even as the police turned out in force, blocking off roads and monuments and arresting more than 700 people, many before they could even reach the main site of the demonstrations along Paris’s main artery, the Champs-Élysées.
Around the country, some 31,000 people took to the streets mostly peacefully, according to the authorities, including in cities like Marseille, Nice and Nantes. But in Paris, more hard-core elements hijacked the demonstrations, turning them violent, though short of last weekend’s levels, the country’s worst urban unrest in decades.
The Yellow Vests have been named for the fluorescent hazard vests adopted by the protesters as a sign of their economic distress. Initially, their ranks were filled by members of the working poor from rural areas dismayed by a planned increase in a fuel tax, which the government canceled this past week in a retreat.
But that did not quell the outrage, which has morphed into much broader anger at President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies, and France’s declining living standards.
The Yellow Vests have now inspired copycat demonstrations elsewhere, including in the Netherlands, Hungary and neighboring Belgium, where about 100 people were detained on Saturday as the police used tear gas and water cannons against about a thousand or more protesters who threw stones and smashed street signs and traffic lights.
In France, Saturday was a pivotal day, as all of the country waited to see if, in the wake of Mr. Macron’s concession, the largely leaderless and unstructured Yellow Vests movement would fizzle or fracture — or perhaps become more emboldened.
The day fulfilled some of the dire predications of French officials, who had anticipated smaller, but still violent, protests as more radical elements and professional vandals, called “casseurs,” or “breakers,” exploited the atmosphere of insurrection in pursuit of pulling down the government or engaging in anarchic pleasures.
President Trump weighed in on the protests with a tweet that suggested the demonstrations were related to the Paris climate accord.
By the midafternoon in Paris, the casseurs had ripped down the plywood that had been placed over the windows of nearly every business in hopes of preventing smashing and looting. The Champs-Élysées was quickly covered in tear gas, and hundreds of people beat a hasty retreat down the avenue.
The presence of the vandals increasingly appeared to be provoking a split in the movement, between the bulk of Yellow Vests and the more violent anarchistic elements that have progressively grafted themselves on to it.
In some areas, the casseurs — fit, determined young men dressed in black — could easily be distinguished from the Yellow Vests, often middle-aged men from the countryside.
In at least one instance, on Avenue Marceau, Yellow Vests could be seen replacing protective boards ripped down from shop windows by the casseurs.
The Yellow Vests looked on in horror and bemusement as the vandals smashed in the windows of a sporting-goods store and made off with boxes of sneakers on one of the most chic avenues around the Arc de Triomphe.
“This is just madness,” said a middle-aged Yellow Vest, Franck Morlat, a train driver who had traveled from central France. “Totally unacceptable.” Others around him looked disgusted.
As protesters were smashing in windows with golf clubs on Avenue Marceau, an ambulance driver and Yellow Vest from the Dordogne who gave her name only as Stephanie and was watching the violence said: “Sure it’s sad. But if it hadn’t come to this, nothing would change.”