Marseille counts the cost of riotous weekend as curfew looms

Thunder and lightning rolled across Marseille on Monday night, illuminating the cracked windows and boarded-up doors of hundreds of businesses smashed when the weekend's protests gave way to disorder.

France's second city suffered some of the worst violence as chaos gripped the country on Saturday. Local business leaders say more than 500 premises were damaged, the majority of them looted. A police union official told the BBC the weekend had been an "apocalyptic" ordeal for his colleagues, with 118 officers injured—more than a tenth of the national total. So far 101 arrests have been made in the port city, a quarter of them children.

By Monday it was police, not protesters, who were most conspicuous on the streets. For eight hours, demonstrations and gatherings were banned in an effort to avert a third consecutive day of disorder. The measure appeared to work: the largest central gathering witnessed was a cluster of weather-beaten tourists trudging around the quayside. An overnight curfew for minors is nonetheless expected to be announced for parts of the city from Tuesday.

Marseille is one of France's most ethnically diverse cities, a place where generations of new arrivals have landed. Maryame, an 18-year-old student, arrived only weeks ago, albeit from the countryside not far away. "It was very scary because it's my first time in a big city, and also my first time demonstrating," she said. Violence engulfed the student march her friends had joined as looters attacked shops. The solidarity of the earlier demonstration was "beautiful", she said, and the disorder that followed "terrifying"—yet she was torn over whether more violence might force the government to listen. "It is a very complicated question if violence is legitimate," she said. "But the thing is, France, our history is really based on revolution, and sometimes we really have to make a really big impact. Sometimes it goes too far."

For the police, the speed at which order collapsed came as a shock. "It was a war," said Arnaud Blaise of the UN1TE police union. "An unheard-of level of violence. Unprecedented." Looting was reported across the city centre, including along La Canebière—Marseille's equivalent of the Champs-Élysées—Rue Paradis and the Centre Bourse shopping centre, as well as at the Grand Littoral and Le Merlan malls to the north. Blaise feared future protests could follow Saturday's destructive pattern, with young people from deprived northern suburbs seizing the chance to steal amid chaos he said was stirred up by far-left agitators known as the Black Bloc. "The Black Blocs provoked, and the youngsters took advantage to start looting," he said. "That created chaos, with police officers running right, running left, and in effect, we got overwhelmed."

Put to him that officers had been accused of heavy-handedness towards peaceful students while standing back as violent protesters pillaged businesses, Blaise rejected the charge, arguing that more police than students had been injured. "Four thousand tear gas grenades were fired and then we ran out of ammunition," he said. "So at a certain point, you have no choice but to retreat."

Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, whose resignation after the riots President Macron rejected, travelled to Marseille on Monday evening. He came to the City Hall, briefly occupied by protesters on Saturday, and met the city's Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, who demanded answers as to how the chaos was allowed to happen. "Order was lost, and an attempt was made to restore order. I believe that from start to finish, it was a fiasco," Payan said. Under-staffed and poorly deployed police needed to change tactics, he argued. "If there isn't a radical change of approach on this issue—if, by chance, the only target remains high school students—then we will see looting scenes again." He added: "I don't know what's left to loot in Marseille, but for the little that remains, it will be looted."

The ban on public gatherings in Marseille and partial overnight curfews elsewhere have brought temporary calm, but more demonstrations are planned for the weekend. At a smashed tram stop, Chantal Bellanger, a 79-year-old grandmother, said she had been "worried—but then, I've been worried for a long time". She went on: "We can clearly see that France has lost its grip on many things. Public services, hospitals, education is in a horrible state, the peripheral neighbourhoods are dilapidated, they are abandoned." She once worked in those deprived northern suburbs, where poverty and crime are high, and feared a lost generation was criminalising itself through anger and despair. "It tugs at your heartstrings," she said. "To see children whose actions are going to place them completely outside of society. It's painful to watch."