{"id":664757,"date":"2026-10-25T08:38:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T08:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/664757\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T08:38:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T08:38:11","slug":"nearly-1000-people-arrested-during-protests-in-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/664757\/","title":{"rendered":"Nearly 1,000 people arrested during protests in France"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly 1,000 people were arrested during protests in France yesterday, as clashes erupted while protesters took to the streets in a number of cities.<\/p>\n

Police carried out the arrests as officers faced “an extremely elevated level of violence” from black-clad “ultra-left” extremists, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said.<\/p>\n

It comes a week after marches that degenerated into violence and prompted a firm security backlash from President Emmanuel Macron, who is scrambling to restore order.<\/p>\n

Riot police squads fired tear gas at protesters in the capital as well as in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes yesterday.<\/p>\n

Two people were “seriously” injured, Mr Nunez said: one man in Toulouse, who reportedly had fingers blown off, and another person in Clermont-Ferrand. He did not give details of either case.<\/p>\n

Authorities had deployed 70,000 security personnel across the country for the new marches, called to protest the cost of living.<\/p>\n

The violence came a week after rioting that saw public buildings vandalised, hundreds of shops looted and 2,700 people arrested, casting a pall over the country six months before an election to choose Mr Macron’s successor.<\/p>\n

Mr Nunez said the outcome of this protest was more “positive” than a week ago, with more police on the streets acting more rapidly, conducting more pre-demonstration checks and better protecting businesses.<\/p>\n

However, there was widespread anger at the government over a protest crackdown viewed as an assault on the right to protest.<\/p>\n

\"Protesters,
\nAuthorities had deployed 70,000 security personnel across the country for the new marches<\/p>\n

Police battle ‘rioters’<\/p>\n

The demonstrations drew between 410,000 and 800,000 people across the country, according to different estimates by authorities and the organising CGT union.<\/p>\n

The main Paris march had between 110,000 and 250,000 attendees, according to those sources.<\/p>\n

Mr Macron’s government has ordered police to prevent protesters reaching city centres, where shops are concentrated, and in Paris and some other cities, partial curfews were imposed in certain urban zones.<\/p>\n

The French president had ordered non-union demonstrations to be banned as “illegitimate”.<\/p>\n

In Paris, where many shops had boarded up windows to prevent looting, and the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay museums shut for the day, the main demonstration passed off largely peacefully.<\/p>\n

The march had been pushed to the capital’s southeast rim under a last-minute order by authorities.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, though, clashes broke out as the crowd was dispersing, with Mr Nunez blaming “500 rioters” at the back of the march.<\/p>\n

Ultra-right vs ultra-left<\/p>\n

Thousands of protesters in the western city of Nantes broke through lines of police firing tear gas and a water cannon to reach the city centre, an AFP journalist witnessed.<\/p>\n

One 23-year-old protester who came out in the northwest city of Rennes, denounced the bans on demonstrations and the “repression” of protests by high school students demanding better learning conditions.<\/p>\n

Marching in the rain at the head of the protest in the northern city of Lille, 47-year-old Delphine insisted: “Neither the president, nor the weather will stop me from demonstrating.”<\/p>\n

In Lyon, police used tear gas to disperse around 1,000 people gathered in the south of the city.<\/p>\n

“If they ban protests, that means we’re heading more and more towards a regime that is fascist, that is dictatorial,” said another protester in Lyon.<\/p>\n

\"A
\nAuthorities had deployed 70,000 security personnel across the country for the new marches<\/p>\n

In the southern cities of Cannes and Montpellier, far-right activists clashed with “ultra-left militants”, in what authorities said was an unprecedented development.<\/p>\n

There was looting on the sidelines of the marches in Marseille and Grenoble, police said.<\/p>\n

The Yellow Vests, who staged disruptive protests against Mr Macron eight years ago, called for more demonstrations on 31 October for “the freedom to protest”.<\/p>\n

Far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who marched in Paris, said the movement “is going to repeat itself every week”.<\/p>\n

Le Pen protest<\/p>\n

Tensions were heightened by a rally in the city of Orleans by far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party to kick off her campaign for the presidential election.<\/p>\n

Thousands of counter-protesters chanting anti-fascist slogans marched in the city.<\/p>\n

The unrest across France highlighted the political atmosphere ahead of the vote, in which Ms Le Pen leads in surveys.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nMarine Le Pen will make her first major presidential campaign speech later today<\/p>\n

Inflation in France, particularly affecting the cost of fuel, has surged since the start of the Middle East war in February.<\/p>\n

“I’m going to try and instill a bit of optimism,” said the four-time presidential hopeful, who has cast herself as the law-and-order candidate, ahead of her first major campaign speech.<\/p>\n

Protests have also broken out in Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal over different issues, yet with some overlap on inflation and education problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 1,000 people were arrested during protests in France yesterday, as clashes erupted while protesters took to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-664757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}