‘Yellow Vest’ protests turn violent; Paris quick to respond
PARIS — A third week of anti-government protests intensified in violence on Saturday, as demonstrators burned cars, smashed windows and confronted riot police firing tear gas in the heart of Paris in the most serious crisis of President Emmanuel Macron’s administration.
The ‘’Yellow Vest’’ protests — spurred by a hike in the gasoline tax, and named for the roadside safety vests worn by the demonstrators — have emerged as a spontaneous outcry over declining living standards.
Diffuse, seemingly leaderless and organized over the internet, they have drawn deepening and widespread support in the country, where other demonstrations were mostly peaceful on Saturday.
But in Paris the protests took a more sinister turn as they were joined by extremists on the left and right, anarchists and organized labor, all seeking to capitalize on the simmering discontent. The violence crossed a new threshold for the Macron administration, and raised alarm even in a country where organized protest is commonplace.
Even if mostly perpetrated by vandals who have now latched on to the movement, the symbolism of the day’s violence was powerful. A modern-day peasants’ and workers’ revolt against a president increasingly disdained for his regal remove turned the country’s richest boulevards and most prominent landmarks into a veritable war zone.
Confrontations between the police and demonstrators, alongside the professional vandals called “casseurs” by the French, spread to several of the city’s most famous sites including Concorde and Trocadero. Overturned cars, some in flames, burned in parts of the 1st arrondissement and the 8th arrondissement far from the Champs-Élysées.
Inside the Tuileries Gardens, a car burned in front of the Orangerie. On one side of the burning car was a mass of Yellow Vests and “casseurs,” and on the other a line of riot police, at the Place de la Concorde end of the Tuileries. The demonstrators moved forward and the police responded with a volley of tear gas, scattering the Yellow Vests and the vandals.
On the other side of the Rue de Rivoli from the Tuileries, several store windows had been smashed in, including high-end clothing store Zadig & Voltaire.
By nightfall, major thoroughfares were covered in broken glass and the smell of tear gas mixed with the smoke from the burning cars. Some 100 people had been injured, including one who was in a coma after being hit by a railing that was torn down by protesters near the Tuileries; 268 people had been arrested, according to the police.
It did not help that Mr. Macron was 7,000 miles away in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting. Even there, the outburst could not be dismissed or ignored, as his government has mostly tried to do over the past few weeks.
‘’What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate anger,” said Mr. Macron, who returns today to Paris. “Nothing justifies attacking the security forces, vandalizing businesses, either private or public ones, or that passersby or journalists are threatened, or the Arc de Triomphe defaced,” he said.
Prime minister Edouard Philippe made a point of distinguishing between those who had come prepared to fight the police and those with whom the government was willing to talk.
“We are attached to freedom of expression, but also to respect for the law,” said Mr. Philippe, who canceled a planned trip to a climate conference in Poland because of the violence. Yet it was two weeks into the protests before the government agreed to meet them. The meeting was “interesting, frank and respectful,” said Mr. Philippe, adding that his door remained open.
But the “open door” was undercut by other ministers who publicly said there would be no backing down on the government’s new gas taxes or its overall program.