‘It looks
like a war zone’: France reels as looting continues for second night
Angelique
Chrisafis
in Paris
Just before
1am on Monday morning, two motorbikes carrying one passenger each stopped at
a traffic light on a backstreet near rue de Rivoli, one of central
Paris’s busiest shopping streets.
“You’ve
got to go where there are a lot of people, where they’ve done the shop
windows,” said one
motorbike rider to another. Minutes later 10 other men, their faces covered
with ski balaclavas, came down the street on foot pursued by a police van.
People enter
a ransacked Franprix store as clashes erupted at Place de la Republique
following an unauthorised demonstration, central Paris. Photograph: Matthieu
Rondel/AFP/Getty Images
Soon after Emmanuel
Macron’s televised
speech on Sunday night telling the nation it was “unbearable to see our
streets ransacked”, groups of men looted shops in central Paris for hours
for a second night running. Dozens of people attempted to smash windows
near Les Halles shopping centre and grab goods. Others broke into an electrical
shop in Belleville in the north of the city.
“Men were
battering shop windows, trying to break in, then they were chased by police,”
said a 73-year-old woman near Les Halles.
“There were
different groups running everywhere with police chasing on foot or by car, and
at the same time, some people were setting bins and bikes alight. The groups
breaking into shops aren’t hostile to passersby so you’d see local residents
walking down the street on their way home late at night, and masked teenagers
running past in the other direction carrying looted goods. It’s so strange –
it’s like two different universes in parallel worlds.”
She said:
“It
says a lot about society – it shows we have neglected our education system and
that we’re living in a consumer society where all we say to our young people
is: ‘buy, buy, buy’. In this type of extreme capitalism, some people don’t
have enough money to buy all of this and so they attack.”
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