PARIS ― Over 46 years running a gourmet deli with her sister in Paris, Sylvie Calvi has seen all sorts of protests at the Place de la République nearby. Still, she was stunned by the rioting in the neighborhood last weekend, which eclipsed the public outcry over the rising cost of living.
“When we returned the next morning,” Calvi said, “all the neighbors, everyone was really sour, anxious, too.”
Shopkeepers along this Parisian boulevard said they couldn’t grasp how the night devolved so quickly into mayhem. But what many said they did understand was the common refrain — from people who joined the protests and those who became targets of the ensuing riots: There is a “ras-le-bol” — a “bowl full to the brim,” meaning everyone is totally fed up.
“The French people today feel abandoned, lost. We don’t know what we’re heading toward,” Calvi said. “I think people are fed up with being taken for imbeciles.” She said she hoped “things will go better next Saturday,” when unions and activists have called for new demonstrations, and the government has pledged to deploy more police onto the streets.
Like other witnesses to last weekend’s chaos, Calvi drew a distinction between protesters, whose grievances she said she understood, and what she described as black-clad agitators who disrupted the demonstration.
She said it seemed as though police floundered when confronted by a mob mentality that swept up some people on the sidelines of the protest and by looters who seized the opportunity to ransack stores.
In the Paris town hall on Thursday night, Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire hosted a meeting for the French capital’s residents to grapple with the complexity of the moment.
“There is an aggregation of anger,” Grégoire said, noting that weeks of students protests converged with the grievances of farmers, public workers and others. “All of this is crystallizing in anger that is first creating a very important social movement.”
One person after another took the microphone to describe feeling unheard or unprotected. Many directed blame at the country’s leaders for failing to fix problems weighing on the economy and public services, inflaming the political discourse, disrupting the schools and hiking up their grocery bills.
Some attendees said they wanted to join the rallies on Saturday with their children but feared further unrest and clashes with police.
Grégoire, who is a member of the center-left Socialist Party, said he understood “this feeling that nothing is going right,” and he sought to offer a message of hope that citizens, led by young people, were now engaged in the country’s future.
A business owner said that he could not find wooden panels to board up his store. Students questioned why police were heavy-handed when responding to school walkouts, only to then fail to contain the rioting.
The tense mood here, even after some calm returned to Paris this week, illustrates the depth of discontent France is contending with at a pivotal moment as President Emmanuel Macron winds down his second term. Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally leads in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, followed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left France Unbowed party.
Tony Dipietra, a university student, received a round of applause after telling the town hall meeting he felt “a lot of contempt from the government toward this social movement.”
Dipietra told The Washington Post that he was playing trombone as part of a Parisian orchestra to entertain demonstrators last weekend when he got tear-gassed even before the day spiraled into nighttime riots.
“We were literally not doing anything, playing music, just livening up the place,” he said. Dipietra said he did not condone the rioting that smashed up storefronts and looted small businesses. Still, he added, people felt they were “treated unfairly for nothing” by the police.
“I think this gratuitous violence that some people experienced has no doubt fueled much more tension,” Dipietra said, “and there was an escalation of hatred, of violence.”
He also lamented some government officials painting the public uproar as orchestrated by the hard left. Dipietra said he joined the protests over the rising cost of living in Paris. “I live in an apartment that takes up three-quarters of my salary and all that remains is for me to eat, and this is the cheapest housing I could find,” he said.
The movement, which has been gathering momentum for weeks, originated with a focus on underfunded schools in the Paris suburbs, but it has expanded to wider grievances over social and economic injustice. Protests grew with the support of labor unions voicing fury at Macron’s administration over price increases and proposed budget cuts.
More than half a million people marched around the country last weekend, before the disorder erupted and streets were lit up with bonfires of torched electric scooters and cars.
In some cities, masked rioters stormed city halls. In central Paris, mobs smashed symbols of wealth such as Louis Vuitton and Hermes luxury boutiques, but looters also attacked smaller corner shops, taking goods such as video games and bottles of wine.
At least 3,000 businesses nationwide were damaged or otherwise affected, according to government officials who have promised aid.
Discontent has also rippled across other European countries, including Italy and Belgium, with some of those protests also driven by young people and affordability concerns.
In France, political and financial troubles in recent years have left citizens fatigued by a sense of lingering crisis, and they are demanding more from the debt-burdened state and politicians riven by division.
Since the weekend’s violence, Macron has acknowledged challenges, vowing to restore order and address the discontent, particularly from high school students and citizens pinched by rising energy prices.
He said the government is following a “clear road map” to prevent a repeat of the violence while consulting with protesters over their demands.
Macron convened meetings on Thursday and Friday with security agencies and government ministers on how to respond to the unrest. Authorities imposed curfews in some Parisian neighborhoods and banned protests this weekend in several cities, including Marseille and Lyon.
The French president said this was necessary for “a return to calm,” to protect businesses and public buildings. Officials said other demonstrations led by unions would be authorized along specific routes.
At least one protest ban, however, was struck down by a Paris court Thursday.
Several museums in Paris, including the Louvre, announced closures on Saturday.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu also met with union leaders and officials from the country’s fractious political parties in recent days
The frustrations run deep.
Sophie Binet, leader of the major General Confederation of Labour (CGT) labor union that has called for a strike on Nov. 5, said the union saw no concrete steps emerge from the government meeting.
“What people want is to talk about our lives, our working conditions, our salaries, our pensions, public services,” Binnet told reporters Thursday at a gathering of nurses on strike in the southern city of Toulon. “And so, from the start of the year, the mobilizations are multiplying,”
The government has accused “ultraleft” groups it calls “black blocs,” which are typically aligned with anarchist or anti-capitalist movements, of disrupting protests and stoking violence — along with opportunistic looters.
Government ministers have acknowledged security lapses that left police unable to contain the mayhem and pledged a “massive” security operation ahead of this Saturday’s demonstrations.
The more than 2,500 people detained during the rioting represented a range of French society, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said, but he noted that 95 percent were men and 70 percent adults, including both “people of immigrant origin” and other French citizens. Macron has lashed out at foreign politicians who claim immigration is driving the protests.
Samuel Marcialo, who owns a telephone shop in Paris and is a father, has security camera footage of dozens of looters destroying and emptying out his store last Saturday.
He said it seemed ironic to him, as a Parisian with parents of Tunisian and Italian origin who was hit by the rioting, that some blamed it on migration. “These were French people whose parents did not do their homework,” Marcialo said.
He said it will cost him thousands to fix the store’s broken facade, ripped-out door, and shattered-glass casings inside.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened that day. … I don’t understand how they could break so much … and with no police,” Marcialo said.
He added: “I’m worried about what happens next, with the election.”
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