The French government acknowledged on Monday a failure in handling the rioters who attacked the police, ransacked public buildings and looted stores in cities across the country over the weekend.
France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered a mea culpa on national radio, saying that the police had been underprepared to deal with the scale of the riots that spun out from planned protests on Saturday night. He said he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron but that it had not been accepted.
The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, also acknowledged that the authorities had “undeniably failed” in the face of the violence — the biggest unrest to hit France in years — and said on French television that there had been “a failure in intelligence.”
With many people in France still stunned on Monday by the scale of the damage, mayors and councilors gathered outside their city halls to show that they were still standing and to demand answers from the national government.
Benoît Payan, the mayor of Marseille, has accused the government and the police of “delivering” that city — France’s second largest — to “looters and rioters.”
Speaking to French radio earlier on Monday, he accused the region’s prefect of inflating the number of rioters that had attacked city hall and local stores, and said that he was seeking “explanations” and “the guarantee that this will not happen again” from the government.
“I want compensation down to the last cent,” he added, saying: “You cannot leave a country to sink into a political crisis without an answer.”
After sporadic episodes of violence and looting persisted in several French cities on Sunday — including in Paris, where the police chief said 351 people had been arrested — several cities undertook measures aimed at restoring calm on Monday.
The authorities in Marseille banned gatherings throughout the city from 12 to 8 p.m. that day, a local official said on social media. In Denain, a small town in northern France, city officials said on social media that a curfew would be in place from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. through Oct. 25.
Amid calls for calm and order, there were questions about what would happen next.
The students who started a protest movement more than a month ago by blockading their high schools to demand better conditions are now on a two-week vacation. However, other groups have joined the protests in solidarity and to highlight their own grievances — with some seemingly determined to keep the movement going.
A group of university students blocked entrances to the Louvre museum Monday morning, preventing it from opening its doors.
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