Macron
criticises ‘unbridled violence’ after days of unrest and 2,000 arrests across
France
Ministers,
officials and police under pressure over response to protests as government
holds crisis talks amid ‘colossal failure of the state’
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Sun 18
Oct 2026 20.57 CEST
The
French president, Emmanuel Macron, has criticised “unbridled violence” after
one of the most violent days of unrest in years left public buildings burned,
hundreds of shops destroyed and looted and more than 2,000 people
arrested in cities across the country.
“Watching
these images, we have all asked ourselves how could French people do this to France?” he said in a
televised address.
Macron
said “nothing justifies” violence and that local state officials would be able
to ban certain street gatherings if they deemed it necessary.
Emmanuel
Macron delivered his comments on the unrest during a speech broadcast on French
television. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
He said a
distinction must be drawn between what he called genuine, peaceful
demonstrators making demands over the cost of living and the education system,
and others who “destroy, ransack and loot”. He criticised what he called
“factious groups from the ultra-left, joined by numerous delinquents”.
Politicians
on the left and right called for the resignation of the interior minister,
Laurent Nuñez, after the government appeared to have been caught by surprise by
the scale of violence on Saturday as state buildings were stormed and torched,
bus stops smashed, roads barricaded and shops broken into and destroyed.
Protests also took place in Spain, Italy and Portugal.
Crowds
clashed with police at Place de la République in central Paris on Sunday afternoon as
violence flared for a second day. Electric bikes were piled in some streets and
set alight. Bottles and rocks were thrown and thick plumes of smoke rose from
burning bins. Police responded with teargas and stun grenades.
Police
officers stand guard as a fire burns in Paris on Sunday night. Photograph:
Abdul Saboor/Reuters
A car
burns in a Paris street near graffiti reading ‘introduction to civil war’.
Photograph: Guillaume Saligot/AFP/Getty Images
Police
and officials faced challenges of different types on Saturday. First, tens of
thousands of peaceful protesters attended calm marches through major cities
including Paris, supporting schoolchildren’s demands
for more teachers and repairs to decrepit schools. Those marches, which
came after four weeks of street marches and barricades
of schools, were attended by parents, teachers and grandparents as well as
students and workers protesting over the high cost of living. The demonstrators
carried banners saying the government was not listening to them and calling for
more money for public services.
But
separately to those peaceful demonstrations, different groups caught police and
officials by surprise with moving gatherings, sporadic burning, the barricading
of streets and clashes with police in cities including Paris, Bordeaux, Nice
and Marseille.
A
protester throws a smoke flare towards gendarmes in Bordeaux, south-western
France. Photograph: Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images
Finally,
masked looters took advantage of what French media called the “chaos” on the
streets to smash shopfronts and grab goods. In Paris, groups of looters, some
of whom appeared to be children, were seen running through the night with
clothes and shoeboxes after masked adult men smashed shopfronts.
In Paris,
where police said a record 855 people had been arrested, the burnt-out remains
of barricades built using bikes, bins and other materials littered streets on
Sunday. Several streets had smashed shop windows and the remains of torched
cars. The capital had experienced “a level of violence that we have never seen
before, I believe”, said the Socialist deputy mayor, Lamia El Aaraje.
Masked
protesters by the graffiti-covered Statue de la République on Sunday evening.
Photograph: Matthieu Rondel/AFP/Getty Images
Burnt-out
cars, smashed windows and the remains of barricades littered the streets of
Paris on Sunday. Photograph: Stéphanie Lecocq/Reuters
In
Limoges in central France, where the 19th-century town hall was burned down,
the mayor, Guillaume Guérin, said the people who stormed his building “were not
demonstrators that defend causes” but “people organised for war”. He said those
who stormed and torched the town hall had told a building caretaker he would be
killed, and told elected officials they would “burn”. He said there had been a
failure of the state to deal with the crisis.
“Around
3.30pm our municipal police, although present in number, found themselves no
longer able to fight against the violence of rioters because they had run out
of ammunition,” Guérin said. He called this “a colossal failure of the state”.
A
demonstrator in front of burning barricades in Marseille. Photograph: Sener
Yilmaz Aslan/Getty Images
In
Marseille, where masked groups stormed the city hall and a police station, the
Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, told BFMTV: “I have no words … I never thought
I’d ever live through something like this. Hordes of rioters and looters
attacked our common [state] buildings … with no real demands, but with the sole
aim to wreck the demands of those who had demonstrated legitimately.”
Payan
said questions must be asked about policing tactics, as other town hall
buildings, for example in Lille, were also targeted.
Protesters
arrive to force entry into the town hall in Lille, northern France. Photograph:
Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Images
Grégory
Doucet, the Green mayor of Lyon, said he had never seen such violence in his
city, including the torching of the historic tourist office. He told Le Monde:
“I’m stunned by the violence against public and state property. I saw and heard
fear and anger. Shop owners felt abandoned.”
Doucet
said the government must find a “sense of nuance” in properly examining what
happened and “avoiding stereotypes”. He said the government needed to give a
political response to long-running societal demands from peaceful demonstrators
on one hand, and also examine the roots of violence.
Traders’
unions said more than 1,500 shops and businesses had been ransacked, with the
cost running into tens of millions of euros. “This had nothing to do with the
peaceful protesters,” said one shoe shop owner in Paris. “These were organised
groups who were breaking things and looting. We’d never seen anything like it.”
A
protester wrapped in a French national flag stands in front of Lyon’s burning
tourism office. Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images
Opposition
politicians questioned the government’s policing tactics, saying there had been
a lack of state intelligence.
The
interior ministry said there had been more than 2,000 arrests and about 600
police, firefighters and paramedics had been hurt. A 17-year-old boy had his
right hand blown off by a crowd-control grenade in the east-central city of
Saint-Étienne. A 17-year-old girl lost an eye in Mulhouse and a policr
investigation was opened into the circumstances.
Macron’s
centrist government and the far-right frontrunner for the presidential
election, Marine Le Pen, both blamed what they called “ultra-left” groups for
the violence. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said the government would
not be “intimidated” by violence, and blamed the unrest on
the “ultra-left” and criminals.
The
radical-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who attended the
peaceful street demonstration in Paris on Saturday, accused the government of
organisational failings that had “opened the door to chaos”.
Lecornu
replied on social media: “Laying the responsibility for violence on heads of
police is a dangerous and cynical reversal of responsibilities.”
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