At least 100 injured in France’s gas price protests

PARIS — A third week of anti-government protests grew more violent 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 an increase in the gasoline tax and named for the roadside safety vests worn by the demonstrators 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 onto 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.

By nightfall, some 100 people had been injured, including one who was in a coma; 268 people had been arrested, according to police.

It did not help that Macron was 7,000 miles away in Argentina for the Group of 20 economic summit. 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 Macron.

A Yellow Vest representative from Indres, a department in the center of France, who was interviewed on BFM, a television network here, said Macron had to take drastic steps to quell the unrest, “recognizing that this is a serious moment for our country.”