PARIS — Two large sections of central Paris were shut down in a curfew Monday night as France was reeling from a weekend of nationwide rioting and looting that left much of the country stupefied by the scarcity of police in some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods.
Grocery stores, clothing shops, cafés, health clinics and public buildings were ransacked in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux and other cities. Overwhelmed police forces often failed to intervene as thousands of vandals, many wearing masks and caps that hid their faces, shattered storefront windows and walked off with merchandise.
Crowds of young adults set cars, electric bikes and trash cans on fire. A patchwork of blazing barricades blocked traffic on many Paris streets and shrouded nearby buildings in black smoke.
What began last week with peaceful protests by high school students demanding better conditions in schools beset by overcrowding and decrepit facilities has morphed into roiling protests nationwide denouncing rising living costs and inequities in French society.
More than 500,000 people took to the streets Saturday and although most marched peacefully, others rampaged and began looting. The violence has left many in France with a sense that their nation was unraveling with a deeply unpopular president struggling to manage a growing debt crisis amid extreme social and political divisions.
In a televised speech from the Élysée Palace as looting was resuming on Sunday evening, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the nation’s “anger and shame,” saying he had ordered his government to “draw every lesson” from its handling of the violence.
“I expect clear answers,” he said hours before leaving France for a three-day visit to the Middle East in what he billed as an effort to secure France’s fuel supplies amid rising costs he attributed to the U.S. war with Iran.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who conceded Monday that police had “lost control” of some big cities, offered his resignation, but Macron declined to accept it.
Macron’s 10 years as president is coming to an end next spring. The leading candidate to succeed him in the presidential election next spring is Marine Le Pen, who would be the first far-right leader of France since the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II. She has pledged a restoration of public order, along with a crackdown on immigration and a halt to French aid to Ukraine.
On Monday, authorities imposed an 11 p.m. curfew on the République and Les Halles sections of Paris, both of them ravaged by looting over the weekend. Curfews were also declared in Lyon, Nice, Lille and other cities.
France is not the only European to experience unrest in recent days. Violent protests have broken out in Italy and Albania. Rising housing costs triggered demonstrations this year in Spain and Portugal.
In Les Halles, Assia Sanaa was unable to stop assailants from smashing windows and making off with nearly all of the sneakers and sportswear in four Shinzo shops that she owns on the Rue Étienne Marcel.
Sanaa said she called the police 20 times, to no avail.
“You know what they told me? ‘Stop calling, ma’am. You’re jamming the line.’”
She was furious at the government’s response to the unrest.
At the same time, Sanaa sympathized with the police, who were far outnumbered by vandals, many of them young men from France’s poorest suburbs, where youth unemployment is rampant.
With no police in sight, Sanaa and other shopkeepers who were targeted along the Rue Étienne Marcel watched as small groups of looters used mobile phones to tip each other off to the cops’ whereabouts, handily winning the cat-and-mouse chase.
“We were in a no-man’s land, left to fend for ourselves,” Sanaa said.
In much of Paris, graffiti spray-painted onto storefronts denounced Macron, the police and the far-right French media baron Vincent Bolloré. “Your world is burning down!” was scrawled across one shattered window near the Place de la République, where protesters tossed projectiles at police on Saturday amid clouds of tear gas.
Just down the street from the Élysée Palace, “Death to the king” was written in red spray paint on the wall of a vandalized Yves Saint Laurent boutique on the Rue Saint Honoré, one of the world’s premier luxury shopping strips.
Shaken Paris shopkeepers, who were consoled by many passersby on Monday as street cleaners swept up shattered glass, said the groups erecting barricades, setting fires and tagging buildings with political messages appeared to be distinct from both the high school demonstrators and the vandals attacking businesses.
Macron’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, accused the far-left presidential contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon of trying to blame police commanders for the unrest.
Mélenchon, leader of the France Unbowed party, has denounced police tactics against high-school students — in one incident a 15-year-old student had his hand torn off by a police grenade — but has condemned protester violence.
On a grocery run in Les Halles on Monday, Jean-Pierre Frankfower, a retired actor and philosopher, blamed the government for the upheaval, saying it neglected social services and education and was too aggressive toward demonstrators.
“It doesn’t surprise me, because it had been simmering for a while,” he said.
Early Sunday morning, near the Place de la République, a part-time crossing guard named Joëlle, 71, scanned the wreckage along the Boulevard Voltaire from a bench, holding her shaggy shepherd mix, Pollux, on a leash. From her apartment window, she’d seen vandals set fires the night before.
Joëlle, who declined to give her last name because of her work for City Hall, agrees with critics of Macron who say the center-right president has favored the rich. She also lamented the chronic joblessness among young people in France.
To her, the city felt like a war zone.
“This isn’t Paris anymore,” she said.
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