Protests again rage in France
Paris shuts down amid violence; arrests at 974 nationwide
PARIS — The rumble of armored police trucks and the hiss of tear gas filled central Paris on Saturday as French riot police fought to contain thousands of yellow-vested protesters venting their anger against the government in a movement that has grown more violent by the week.
A ring of steel surrounded the president’s Elysee Palace — a destination for the protesters — as police stationed trucks and reinforced metal barriers throughout the neighborhood.
Stores along the Champs-Elysees and the Avenue Montaigne boarded up their windows as if bracing for a hurricane. Protesters later ripped off the plywood protecting the windows and threw flares and other projectiles. French riot police repeatedly repelled them with tear gas and water cannons.
Saturday’s crowd was a mix of those taking their
financial grievances to Paris — the center of France’s government, economy and culture — and groups of experienced vandals who tore steadily through some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, smashing and burning.
All of the city’s top tourist attractions — including the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum — shut down Saturday, fearing the kind of damage that hit the Arc de Triomphe monument a week before. Christmas markets and soccer matches were canceled. Subway stations in the city center closed, and the U.S. Embassy warned citizens to avoid all protest areas.
Police and protesters also clashed in other French cities, notably Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux. Some protesters took aim at the French border with Italy, creating a huge traffic backup near the Italian town of Ventimiglia.
French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said 135 people had been injured and 974 taken into custody amid protests around the nation. Paris police headquarters counted 71 injuries in the capital, seven of them police officers.
An estimated 125,000 people demonstrated around France with 10,000 taking their anger to the streets of Paris, double the number in the capital the previous week, he said. Toughening security tactics, French authorities deployed 8,000 security officers in the capital alone, among the 89,000 who fanned out around the country.
Late Saturday, Castaner said the situation in Paris was under control.
“The escalation of violence has been brought to a stopping point,” he said, crediting the strategy of police. The violence, while contained, was “totally unacceptable,” he added.
MACRON’S SILENCE
Amid the melee, President Emmanuel Macron remained silent, as he has for the four weeks of a movement that started as a protest against a gas-tax increase and metamorphosed into a rebellion against high taxes and eroding living standards.
The yellow-vest movement takes its name from the fluorescent hazard vests that French drivers must keep in their vehicles.
The mayor of the city of Saint-Etienne, a town in southeast France hit by violence Saturday, castigated Macron for failing to speak out, saying it “feeds the resentment.”
“This silence becomes contempt for the nation,” Gael Perdriau, of the opposition conservative party, said on BFM-TV. “He has a direct responsibility in what is happening. He can’t remain closed up in the Elysee.”
Edouard Philippe, the French prime minister, has said Macron would speak early this week to address the movement.
France’s yellow-vest protesters have views that span the political spectrum, but the leaderless group is united in its sense that Macron and his government are out of touch.
“We are here to tell [Macron] our discontent. Me, I’m not here to break things because I have four children,” said protester Myriam Diaz. “But I still want to be here to say, ‘Stop, that’s enough.’”
Some protesters sang the French national anthem — “The Marseillaise” — as they confronted phalanxes of police in heavy riot gear.
In some areas, professional vandals — known as “casseurs,” or “breakers” — could easily be distinguished from the yellow vests, often middle-aged men from the countryside.
In at least two instances on the Champs-Elysees, yellow-vest protesters replaced protective boards ripped down from shop windows by the casseurs.
“This is just madness,” said a middle-aged yellow-vest protester, Franck Morlat, a train driver who had traveled from central France. “Totally unacceptable.”
As people were smashing in windows with golf clubs, an ambulance driver and yellow-vest protester who gave her name only as Stephanie said: “Sure, it’s sad. But if it hadn’t come to this, nothing would change.”
Even as blue armored trucks rumbled over cobblestone streets in Paris, a larger environmental march took place peacefully Saturday near the city’s Republique Plaza.
A scattering of yellow-vest protesters, as well as women, children and retirees, were among the 17,000 people marching to demand action against climate change. One sign read: “No climate justice without fiscal and social justice.”
Cyril, a 25-year-old garbage truck driver, arrived from Normandy with three others. He said he earns only $1,625 a month despite working 45 hours a week and has decided not to have children because he doesn’t feel he can earn enough to raise them. This was his third weekend of protesting in Paris.
“I’ve come to defend myself,” he said, adding that he thought Macron’s mistake was trying to change the French economy too quickly. “He’s done more in 18 months than the others in 30 years.”
Macron on Wednesday agreed to abandon the fuel-tax increase, which aimed to wean France off fossil fuels and uphold the Paris climate agreement. Many economists and scientists say higher fuel taxes are essential to save the planet from worsening climate change, but that stance hasn’t defused the anger among France’s working class.
Across the ocean, U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday seized the moment to once again criticize the 2015 Paris climate accord that he is abandoning.
“People do not want to pay large sums of money … in order to maybe protect the environment,” he tweeted.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday used the clashes in Paris to respond in kind to long-standing European criticism of his handling of political opposition at home.
“We will never approve of violent expression of demands for rights, but all opinions and demands can be made clear in democracies,” Erdogan said in Istanbul. “Those who mocked our police force, accusing it of brutality, should now look at their own police force. Europe has failed the class on democracy, freedoms and human rights.”
PROTESTS SPREAD
Also Saturday, Belgian police fired tear gas and water cannons at yellow-vested protesters calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Charles Michel after they tried to breach a riot barricade, as the movement that started in France made its mark in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Protesters in Brussels threw paving stones, road signs, fireworks, flares and other objects at police blocking their entry to an area where Michel’s offices, other government buildings and the parliament are located.
Brussels police spokesman Ilse Van de Keere said about 400 protesters were gathered in the area.
About 100 were detained, many for carrying dangerous objects like fireworks or for having clothing that could be used as protection in clashes with police.
The reasons for the protests are not entirely clear. Neither Belgium nor the Netherlands has proposed an increase in fuel taxes — the catalyst for the demonstrations in France.
Instead, protesters appeared to hail at least in part from a populist movement that is angry at government policy in general and what it sees as the widening gulf between mainstream politicians and the voters who put them in power. Some in Belgium appeared intent only on confronting police.
Earlier in Brussels, police used pepper spray and scuffled with a small group of protesters who tried to break through a barricade blocking access to the European Parliament and the European Union’s other main institutions.
In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, a few hundred protesters in the high-visibility vests that have become a symbol of the movement walked peacefully across the downtown Erasmus Bridge singing a song about the Netherlands and handing flowers to passers-by.
“Our children are hard-working people, but they have to pay taxes everywhere. You can’t get housing anymore. It is not going well in Dutch society,” Ieneke Lambermont said. “The social welfare net we grew up with is gone.”
About 100 protesters gathered in a peaceful demonstration outside the Dutch parliament in The Hague. At least two protesters were detained by police in central Amsterdam.
Jan Dijkgraaf, the editor of a Dutch “resistance newspaper,” said people are yearning for a past, more socially equitable, era of Dutch history, describing it as “a feeling of unity, but also looking after asylum seekers well, taking good care of one another.”
He said violence like that seen in France and to a lesser extent Belgium does not work in the Netherlands.
“The Netherlands is not like France — you light 100 cars on fire and you get what you want,” he said. “If you torch 100 cars here, you are never allowed to demonstrate again and nothing more happens.”
Information for this article was contributed by Elaine Ganley, John Leicester, Angela Charlton, Lori Hinnant, Srdjan Nedeljkovic, Philippe Marion, Milos Krivokapic, Lorne Cook, Mike Corder, Mark Carlson and Peter Dejong of The Associated Press; by Adam Nossiter, Alissa J. Rubin and Aurelien Breeden of The New York Times; and by Onur Ant of Bloomberg News.