Paris protests turned into a night of fires, tear gas and looting Saturday as hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of France and some of the most expensive stores in the world were ransacked.
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Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez put the turnout at 550,000 nationwide, including 110,000 in Paris. The CGT labor union, which helped organize the marches, said the real number was closer to 800,000. Either way, it was one of the largest days of protest France has seen in years.
The fashion capital’s priciest addresses took the hit. Demonstrators broke into Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Apple stores in Paris and Bordeaux. Video circulating online appears to show a Christian Dior store on Rue Saint-Honoré being looted, and videos shared from the same luxury strip show Goyard, the French trunk maker whose flagship has sat on Rue Saint-Honoré since 1853, caught up in the chaos too. A post viewed hundreds of thousands of times claims Dior brought in its own private security team to guard its flagship as the night went on.
More than 300 protesters also tried to push up the Champs-Élysées, the avenue lined with flagship luxury stores, before police blocked them with tear gas.
At Place de la République, where the Paris march began, the scene turned violent by early afternoon. Protesters threw fireworks and rocks at officers, who answered with tear gas and water cannons. A car went up in flames in the middle of the square, along with bicycles, a newspaper kiosk and trash bins. Looters forced their way into a nearby Monoprix supermarket on Boulevard Saint-Denis, and a toy shop was broken into, with people parading the stolen boxes down the avenue while filming themselves.
It was not just Paris. In Marseille, dozens of shops were looted, including a Hermès boutique, and rioters stormed city hall. Protesters smashed into the town hall in Lille, where an Apple store was also cleaned out. In Lyon, the tourist office was set on fire.
The Paris protests did not start with luxury stores or politics. They started at a high school. On September 17, students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry, an underfunded public high school in the Paris suburb of Créteil, walked out over a chronic shortage of teachers, run down facilities and the declining quality of their education. Within weeks, students at hundreds of schools across France had joined them, demanding more teachers, smaller class sizes and buildings that are not falling apart.
Saturday was the biggest day yet because the students were joined by workers, unions and the Yellow Vests, the movement that first took over French streets in 2018 over fuel prices and the cost of living. Their anger now is over the same thing: rising prices, fuel costs and public services they say are crumbling while the country’s money troubles deepen.
The crackdown on this movement has been heavy, and much of it has landed on kids. As of October 6, France’s Justice Ministry reported 5,060 arrests since the protests began, and 87 percent of the people arrested were minors. Nuñez told the French Senate that 248 students and 149 school staff members had been injured, the highest number ever recorded by the country’s Education Ministry. A 15 year old lost his hand to a police stun grenade during a protest in the city of Lens on October 5. On Saturday, another demonstrator lost a hand.
Nuñez said nearly 400 people were arrested on Saturday alone, with more arrests coming in the days ahead, and 60 officers were injured.
President Emmanuel Macron responded on X late Saturday. “No room for violence in our Republic. Those who have broken, attacked the prefectures as well as businesses, looted even our town halls, will be prosecuted and punished,” he wrote. Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said the overwhelming majority of demonstrators wanted to march calmly and that acts of vandalism were tarnishing their protest.
The students who started all of this asked for teachers and classrooms. A month later, the Paris protests have half a million people in the streets, Rue Saint-Honoré covered in broken glass and a government promising more arrests.