What
We Saw at Fast-Track Trials of Riot Suspects in France
At the
Tribunal de Paris, judges have supervised a carousel of expedited and often
chaotic hearings for those detained during recent unrest.
Police
officers confronting protesters in Paris this month.Credit...Lou Benoist/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
By Catherine Porter and Giulia Imbert
At
Paris’s biggest courthouse, the reporters watched several expedited trials of
people arrested during recent riots.
Oct. 21,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/france-riots-court-trials.html
A video
production student accused of hurling cobblestones at the police and helping to
build a barricade.
A
teenager accused of throwing bottles, setting off fireworks and carrying stolen
goods, including seven pairs of glasses.
Two
friends who admitted that they had helped themselves to whiskey bottles from a
ransacked supermarket to celebrate one of their birthdays.
These
were among the carousel of people being tried in expedited and sometimes
tumultuous fashion on Tuesday in a large glass tower of the Tribunal de Paris,
France’s biggest courthouse. After days of chaos spurred by the country’s
largest riots in years, this was the front line of the French state’s attempt
to reassert control and punish people involved in the
unrest.
By
Tuesday, more than 2,500 people had been detained across the country, including
about 550 in Paris. They were a small minority of the more than half a million
people who
joined protests on Saturday. There were still so many of them that the
courthouse doubled the number of courtrooms that it typically reserves for a form of fast-track trial often used for lower-level
crimes in which someone is caught red-handed.
The
justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, has instructed prosecutors to seek harsh
sentences. He promised to come down hard on those who turned largely peaceful
protests into riots that led to attacks on government buildings and the looting
of more than 3,000 businesses. He called the first convictions this week “just
the beginning of the guilty verdicts.”
Image
Gérald
Darmanin, France’s justice minister, leaving a court in Marseille on Wednesday.
He has called for harsh sentences.Credit...Thibaud Moritz/Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
Mr.
Darmanin has been so outspoken that on Tuesday, dozens of defense lawyers in
their black capes crowded before the panel of three judges in one courtroom to
denounce his actions as the politicization of justice. They reminded the judges
that the protests
started in September with teenagers demanding better conditions in their
schools.
Through
days of speculation, the country had learned little about the detainees’
identities. The government repeatedly blamed far-left insurgents and
opportunistic delinquents. On television, Mr. Darmanin said that 95 percent of
the detainees were men, that 70 percent were adults and that they included
“people from immigrant backgrounds, people who are foreigners,” as well as
“people who are fully integrated and who are French.”
The cases
we observed on Tuesday — in courtrooms packed with journalists and the
accused’s friends and relatives — provided some of the first glimpses of who
was arrested.
Each
trial lasted less than an hour, offering only snippets about a defendant’s
background, making it hard to draw conclusions about them as a group.
Of the 14
cases that we followed closely, 10 involved young men, often from working-class
suburbs on the edge of Paris.
Case 1:
The video production student
Among the
first tried on Tuesday was Victor Bertois, 21, the video production student,
who lived with his parents in a suburb north of Paris.
He
arrived in the glass box reserved for defendants with a purple bruise under one
eye and wearing the black T-shirt that he was arrested in.
Mr.
Bertois said he had joined a march on Saturday with his girlfriend to protest
as a student. He said they had found themselves funneled by police officers
into a central square where cops in riot gear were in a standoff with
agitators.
Prosecutors
accused Mr. Bertois of helping build a barricade, throwing paving stones and
other projectiles at the police and screaming an abbreviation of a slur about
the police. He was carrying a smoke flare, the prosecutors said.
Responding
quietly, Mr. Bertois told the three judges that he didn’t throw anything,
didn’t yell anything and didn’t build a barricade. His only intervention, he
said, had been to pull a plank from a burning trash can to stop it catching
fire. Mr. Bertois said that police officers had then charged at him, and he had
fallen to the ground, where officers beat him, causing him to briefly pass out.
The police were not represented in court and the interior ministry did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
Image
Protesters
walking past a fire along Canal Saint Martin in Paris on
Saturday.Credit...Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr.
Bertois’s lawyer, Tristan Lawless, said his client was simply “at the wrong
place at the wrong time.” Mr. Bertois, like other defendants we saw, had no
criminal record.
His
parents, visibly wracked with worry, were in the room. “I don’t understand what
he is doing there,” his father told the judge. “I’m quite distressed.”
The head
judge, Sylvie Moysan, moved quickly, allowing the father to make a witness
statement from the gallery.
Fast-track
trials in France are usually for lower-level crimes like traffic violations,
theft or assault, often when the accused has been caught in the act. Judges
have little time to cross-examine witnesses or dig into testimony.
Court-appointed lawyers often have less than an hour to prepare.
In some
cases on Tuesday, lawyers hadn’t met their clients. And Judge Moysan told the
court that judicial staff had not had time to provide background reports on
some defendants — “too many people in the holding cells.”
After
less than 40 minutes, Judge Moysan adjourned Mr. Bertois’s hearing, leaving him
to wait hours in a holding cell for his verdict.
Case 2:
The tile setter
In the
second case, Moustapha Dembele, 18, struggled to explain why he was at the
protests.
“Work,”
Mr. Dembele mumbled from the glass box. “Prices.”
Mr.
Dembele told the court that he lived with his parents and siblings in a
working-class suburb south of Paris. He has been in France since he was 8, when
his family moved from Senegal, once a French colony. Citing Mr. Dembele’s case
file, Judge Moysan said he was training to set tiles in buildings, but had been
unemployed, supported by his parents, since an injury.
Image
The
Tribunal de Paris, where several cases were heard on Wednesday, has had to
double the number of courtrooms it typically reserves for fast-track
trials.Credit...Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr.
Dembele was arrested in eastern Paris around 11 p.m. on Saturday. The police
said he had been throwing bottles and setting off fireworks at officers, and
had screamed for help from other agitators while being arrested. He was found
with seven pairs of stolen glasses and a new designer T-shirt. He said he had
found them on the street.
“I didn’t
know they were stolen,” he told the court.
He said
he didn’t see any heavy-duty fireworks being shot at the police, nor any tear
gas. “Why were you wearing a mask, then?” the judge asked.
He
offered no answer.
The
prosecutor recommended a 10-month prison sentence. William Word, Mr. Dembele’s
court-appointed lawyer, called that “socially isolating” and “completely
disproportionate” for a man with no criminal history.
After 38
minutes, the court moved onto another case.
Case 3:
The friends
Haïté
Langeron, 21, and Dalvys Mboukou Samba, 20, were among the last to stand trial
on Tuesday. They were arrested together and tried together.
They both
stepped into the box wearing black hoodies and black pants — an outfit often
worn by French teenagers, and so common among the accused that it started to
seem like a uniform.
Mr.
Langeron had turned 21 in a holding cell, awaiting the trial.
The two
friends, both from the Parisian suburbs, were arrested while running with a
crowd down a street in the Marais, a chic, gentrified area of Paris.
They were
carrying bottles of whiskey that they admitted they had taken from a grocery
store that had been looted early in the afternoon, just after the city’s main
demonstration was starting nearby.
The store
owner’s lawyer told the court that the owner had barricaded himself in the
basement for hours, while up to 130 people ransacked his shelves. He estimated
the damages at 45,000 euros — about $50,000.
Image
A looted
store in Paris on Sunday, the day after major nationwide protests.Credit...Emma
Da Silva/Associated Press
Mr.
Langeron said he and his friend had found the store open and “walked around,”
taking the alcohol to celebrate his birthday.
The judge
noted that the police had found Mr. Langeron carrying a “window breaker,”
without giving further details. Mr. Langeron said it was a “work tool.” Mr.
Langeron works as a delivery driver and Mr. Mboukou Samba is looking for work.
In other
cases, the evidence presented publicly was largely based on police reports. In
this case, the judge pored through messages from the defendants’ phones.
“We will
loot everything,” Mr. Mboukou Samba had written on Snapchat.
“I stole
lots of bottles,” he wrote in another message. “We’re going to have a drink.”
Both men
apologized in court.
“It’s not
good what we did. Next time, we will focus on our future,” said Mr. Mboukou
Samba.
“There
won’t be a next time,” Mr. Langeron said.
The
Verdicts
At
different points on Tuesday night, all four men returned to the glass box,
alongside other defendants, to hear the judges deliver verdicts in multiple
cases.
All four
were found guilty and given suspended prison sentences of between six and eight
months, meaning that they will only be sent to jail if they are convicted of
another crime in the next five years.
A civil
trial was set for May to decide what compensation Mr. Langeron and Mr. Mboukou
Samba should pay the store owner.
It was
past 11 p.m. when the court adjourned. There were already more speed trials on
the docket for Wednesday.
Catherine Porter is an
international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
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