Seven days after riots and looting shook dozens of French towns, the protesters came back, but in smaller numbers and into a country that had armed itself for trouble. Students, teachers, union members and yellow-vest activists rallied on Saturday against the cost of living, crumbling schools and stagnant pay. Facing them were some 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, and armoured Centaure vehicles were parked on the streets of Paris and Marseille.
By 1pm Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had counted around 35,000 marchers at 136 events, roughly half the 60,000 people and 264 actions recorded at that hour a week earlier. Police had made 135 arrests, mostly during checks on people heading to rallies. Around the capital alone, officers stopped and searched over a thousand people, confiscating steel balls, pyrotechnic launchers, replica guns and, at one point, a Japanese sword. “We will not allow any disorder,” the minister promised.
Tear gas still drifted over several cities. Officers used it in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Nantes and Clermont-Ferrand, where marchers tried to push past authorised routes, and a water cannon was turned on a crowd in Nantes. Authorities in Bordeaux reported masked groups pulling boards off buildings to build barricades. In the capital the authorised route was pushed out to the ring of boulevards on the city’s southern and eastern edge, and the prefecture said on X that “all is calm”. Meanwhile Marine Le Pen’s party met for its congress in Orléans, where officials put the counter-demonstration at 13,000.
Much of the anger is aimed squarely at Emmanuel Macron. One 26-year-old in Paris described a school where winter wind blew through the classrooms and summer heat reached 35C. Neither side expects quiet soon: the yellow vests have already announced hundreds of actions for 31 October, and unions are preparing rolling strikes for November.
Italy, too, braced for a tense afternoon. Giorgia Meloni’s government sent 500 extra soldiers to Milan, where shops were boarded up after last weekend’s looting, and police searched more than 150 addresses in Milan, Monza and other cities before marches in Rome, Turin and Naples.
