France deployed 70,000 police officers and gendarmes nationwide on Saturday, roughly 10,000 more than the 60,000 sent out the previous weekend, for a second round of mass protests against the cost of living in eight days. The build-up, confirmed by the interior ministry and reported by Al Jazeera, came less than a day after a gunman opened fire on a petrol station, a medical centre and a children’s playground in the Paris suburbs of Trappes and La Verrière, killing one person and wounding five, among them a 12-year-old girl, in what prosecutors have opened as a terrorist attack with a racist motive.
The extra 10,000 officers were a correction to a gap measured the week before. On October 17, the interior ministry had planned for 200,000 protesters nationwide and deployed 60,000 officers to match. It got 550,000 marchers by its own count, or 800,000 by the organisers’, spread across 110 separate marches and including 110,000 in Paris alone, according to France Info. Either count is two-and-a-half to four times the forecast. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez later told France Inter there had been “deux fois et demie plus de personnes” — two and a half times more people — than his ministry had planned for, and that in places its deployment ended up “en asymétrie” with the crowd.
What October 17 cost
The ministry’s same-night estimate put arrests at around 400 and injuries to security personnel at 60. Its consolidated count, released the following Sunday, was far higher: 2,397 arrests and 997 injured police and gendarmes, seven of them seriously, per France Info. Two people died in Paris in circumstances still under investigation. A 17-year-old girl lost an eye in Mulhouse, and a boy of the same age had a hand torn off by a grenade in Saint-Étienne — despite Nuñez having suspended the use of stun grenades against the student movement on October 7, after an identical injury cost a teenager his hand in Lens on October 5.
Property damage followed a similar pattern of competing counts. CBS News and the Associated Press put the number of shops damaged or looted nationwide at 3,000. The retailers’ federation FCD, whose president is Carrefour chief executive Alexandre Bompard, counted 1,500 outlets “directly hit” — the gap probably reflects a broad definition of damage against a narrower one of direct looting — for a bill Bompard estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros, according to France Info. Carrefour alone had 50 stores hit, 19 of them ransacked, at a repair bill exceeding €10 million for the chain. “We cannot allow violence to destroy what generations have put so much energy into building,” Lacoste chief executive Thierry Guibert wrote on X, in a statement echoed by Galeries Lafayette executive chairman Nicolas Houzé and other retail bosses. The texture of that Saturday — boarded shops, a city hall nearly burned down in Limoges — is laid out in an earlier account of France’s autumn of anger.
A smaller crowd, a tighter net
Authorities drew a different lesson than simply adding officers. Prefects banned marches outright in Lyon, Nice and Montpellier while permitting Paris, Marseille and a handful of other cities, a move rights groups called disproportionate, according to Al Jazeera. The government itself had forecast 400,000 to 500,000 marchers nationwide for what French media dubbed the movement’s “Act II.” By 1pm Paris time, Nuñez’s ministry counted just 35,000 marchers and 135 arrests nationwide, according to France24 — a fraction of both the forecast and of the 550,000 to 800,000 who marched a week before, though the figure was an early-afternoon snapshot, not the evening’s final tally.
| Protesters (people) | |
|---|---|
| Authorities' forecast | 200,000 |
| Ministry's count | 550,000 |
| Organisers' count | 800,000 |
Source: French Interior Ministry, via France Info. Figures for October 17; the comparable October 24 count was not final at time of writing
In Lyon, where no march had been authorised, about 150 people tried to block a road anyway; police dispersed them with tear gas within minutes. “They come and disperse marches before they even form,” a 21-year-old student told Agence France-Presse, describing the police as “really mobile.” Weapons seized nationwide by early afternoon included metal balls, lead pellets, fireworks, slingshots, steel balls, a katana and airsoft weapons, Nuñez said, according to CBS News. “So far, there has been no major incident,” he added.
Marine Le Pen opened her campaign in Orléans on Saturday to succeed Emmanuel Macron as president in an election now six months away, with polling showing her best placed to win, per CBS News. Thousands marched against both her and Macron: the prefecture counted 11,000, organisers 26,000 — the same rough counting gap that showed up in October’s bigger numbers. Fifty organisations, including unions, left-wing parties and student groups, had called the counter-protest. The vote will be held as France’s 10-year borrowing costs sit above 5%, a level Macron has blamed on domestic politics rather than, as Donald Trump suggested, migration.
The caution extended well past policing. The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Picasso Museum and the Grand Palais — mid-way through a Cézanne exhibition — shut for the day. Art Basel cancelled its weekend public programme a day after opening. Paris Saint-Germain’s match against Olympique Lyonnais was postponed to Monday night. The NFL’s first Paris game, the Saints against the Steelers, stayed on the calendar for Sunday, though some associated pop-up venues closed, according to Business Insider.
Trappes, a day earlier
Saturday’s protests followed, by less than 24 hours, the shooting in Trappes and La Verrière. Five officers from an anti-crime brigade stopped the attack inside roughly 15 minutes, arresting a 39-year-old suspect, named by officials only as Kevin T., in the nearby town of Coignières, according to CBS News. The man killed was 26-year-old Pengo Bossio Wangi. The wounded 12-year-old girl, shot eight times, was transferred to intensive care, according to ABC News. President Macron, visiting Trappes alongside its mayor Ali Rabeh, said the gunman had deliberately spared people because of their skin colour.
What happened today marks a turning point for the Republic and our country. What happened today was a terrorist and racist attack.
France’s national anti-terrorism prosecutor opened a murder investigation tied to a terrorist enterprise, with an explicit clause on racial or religious motive — rarely invoked, as reported in an earlier account of the case. Investigators said the suspect’s prior convictions had been served and that he was not on France’s terrorism watchlist, though they are examining gas canisters found in his apartment.
The movement that drew 550,000 to 800,000 people on October 17 began last month with high-school students protesting over classroom conditions, before unions, university students and gilets jaunes activists joined over the cost of living. Whether Saturday’s partial count — 35,000 marchers and 135 arrests by early afternoon, against a government forecast of up to half a million — held through the evening, or whether Sunday’s consolidated ministry tally repeats the four-fold jump seen after October 17, is the number due next.