A locked-down Paris is a headache for locals. But it was a heartache on Saturday for first-time visitors from Louisiana, who traveled here for an N.F.L. football game between the New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers and found the Louvre museum closed and the Arc de Triomphe ringed by police vans.
“Just about everything is closed,” said Terri Wallis, 65, a school principal and Saints fan from Baton Rouge, who was visiting with three generations of her family. “You know, we’re not wealthy people. This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip to come and see the Mona Lisa. So, this is a little disappointing.”
The French authorities deployed as many as 70,000 police officers and gendarmes to prevent a repeat of last weekend, when mass protests degenerated into arson, looting and other violence. Officials in Paris and other cities hard hit by the unrest enforced curfews and temporary restrictions on gatherings.
In Paris, fears of another outbreak of violence prompted several cultural institutions, including the Louvre, Grand Palais, Orsay, Orangerie and Picasso museums, to close.
Ms. Wallis and her family were kicking around in a food store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the city’s grandest boulevard, where traffic was light and private security guards were posted at most businesses’ entrances. All along the street, shops and boutiques were boarded up to protect them from looters.
With major cultural sites closed, Paris felt less chaotic than battened-down on a slate-gray Saturday afternoon. At the Louvre, a chain stretched across the door at the museum’s pyramid entrance. The Tuileries Gardens were also closed — because of high winds, a sign said.
While Notre-Dame Cathedral was open, Ms. Wallis said the lines outside it were extremely long, as tourists flocked to one of their few remaining options.
A midday bicycle ride through Paris revealed an eerily empty city. The Place de la Bastille, famous as the site of uprisings during the French Revolution and more recently the locus for student-led protests, had been ruled off-limits to demonstrators by the Paris authorities on Saturday.
A police phalanx, backed by a water-cannon truck and officers on motorcycles, kept the square clear. The police warned over a loudspeaker that anyone who tried to organize an illegal protest would be fined 135 euros, about $150.
“It’s not possible to stay here regardless of why you are here,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. “I ask you to leave the square.”
The authorities pushed the protesters to the southern periphery of the city, a last-minute change in the approved route for the march, which the organizers said was calculated to sow disarray in their ranks. Whether it would avert a repeat of the arson and looting that broke out across Paris last weekend was not yet clear.
Ms. Wallis said she considered calling off the trip after seeing those riots. But the Saints-Steelers game, the first N.F.L. match ever played in Paris, will go ahead as scheduled on Sunday in the Stade de France, a stadium in the Paris suburbs a few miles from where the high school protest movement began last month.
In those demonstrations, students erected barricades in front of their schools to protest dilapidated buildings, a shortage of teachers and a university admissions process that many say is opaque and unfair.
Chelsea Bertrand, who was with the Wallis family and works at an elementary school in Baton Rouge, said that as an educator, she was impressed by how the French students had mobilized, even if it affected her visit.
“You teach them to speak up for what’s right,” she said. “The fact that they’re actually standing up in a positive way — how it originally started — for their rights and what they think is best for education — I think that’s amazing.”
The women said they hadn’t witnessed any unrest and weren’t worried about their safety. Ms. Wallis said marveled at how “nonchalant” some people appeared to be about the disorder, pointing to a viral video on social media that appeared to show a couple relaxing in a cafe last weekend while fires burned outside.
“I thought, ‘OK, that’s the French,’” Ms. Wallis said. “The city’s burning and y’all are just sitting there.”
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