Thunder and lightning have boomed across Marseille following the weekend’s mayhem, illuminating the cracked windows and boarded-up doors of hundreds of businesses that were smashed as protests gave way to disorder.
France’s second city saw some of the worst violence as chaos gripped the country on Saturday. Local business leaders say more than 500 premises were damaged, and the majority looted.
A police union boss told the BBC that the weekend had been an “apocalyptic” hell for his colleagues. 118 officers were injured, representing more than a tenth of the national figure.
So far, 101 arrests have been made in the port city, a quarter of them children.
It seemed to work; the largest central gathering we witnessed was a posse of weather-beaten tourists trudging around the quayside.
Nonetheless, an overnight curfew for minors will come into force in parts of the city from Tuesday evening.
Marseille is one of France’s most ethnically diverse cities – a place where generations of new arrivals have landed.
18-year-old student Maryame only arrived in the southern city a few weeks ago, albeit from the countryside not too far away.
“It was very scary because it’s my first time in a big city, and also my first time demonstrating,” she said.
Maryame said violence engulfed the student demonstration her friends had joined as looters began attacking shops.
She said the solidarity of the earlier march was “beautiful” and the subsequent disorder “terrifying”, but went on to say that she was conflicted as to whether even more violence would make the government sit up and listen.
“It is a very complicated question if violence is legitimate,” she began.
“But the thing is, France, our history is really based on revolution, and sometimes we really have to make a really big impact.
“Sometimes it goes too far.”
‘An unheard-of level of violence’
For the police, the extent to which order disintegrated was a shock, according to one organisation representing rank and file officers.
“It was a war,” said Arnaud Blaise from the UN1TE police union. “An unheard-of level of violence. Unprecedented.”
Looting was reported across the city centre, including along La Canebière – Marseille’s equivalent of Paris’s Champs-Élysées – Rue Paradis, and at the Centre Bourse shopping centre. Businesses were also hit further afield, such as in the Grand Littoral and Le Merlan shopping malls to the north.
Blaise said he was concerned that future protests could follow the same destructive pattern as Saturday, with young people from the deprived northern suburbs seizing the opportunity to steal amid chaos that, in his view, was stirred up by far-left agitators – referred to in France as the Black Bloc.
“The Black Blocs provoked, and the youngsters took advantage to start looting,” Blaise said. “That created chaos, with police officers running right, running left, and in effect, we got overwhelmed.”
I put it to Blaise that the police had been accused of heavy-handedness with peaceful students but sitting back as the most violent protesters pillaged local businesses.
“That is not the case at all,” he replied, arguing that more police than students had been injured.
“Four thousand tear gas grenades were fired and then we ran out of ammunition. So at a certain point, you have no choice but to retreat.”
France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez – whose resignation in the wake of the riots was rejected by President Macron – travelled to Marseille on Monday evening.
He came to the City Hall, which was briefly occupied by protestors on Saturday, and met Marseille’s Socialist Mayor Benoît Payan.
Payan said he wanted answers from the government as to how the chaos was allowed to happen.
“Order was lost, and an attempt was made to restore order. I believe that from start to finish, it was a fiasco,” he said on Monday.
He said under-staffed and poorly deployed police needed to change their tactics.
“If there isn’t a radical change of approach on this issue – if, by chance, the only target remains high school students – then we will see looting scenes again.”
He continued: “I don’t know what’s left to loot in Marseille, but for the little that remains, it will be looted.”
While the ban on public gatherings in Marseille and partial overnight curfews in other French cities have brought some temporary calm, more demonstrations are planned for the weekend.
At a smashed out tram stop, 79-year-old grandmother Chantal Bellanger said she had been “worried – but then, I’ve been worried for a long time”.
“We can clearly see that France has lost its grip on many things. Public services, hospitals, education is in a horrible state, the peripheral neighbourhoods are dilapidated, they are abandoned.”
She said she used to work in these deprived northern suburbs, where poverty and crime rates are very high, and feared a whole lost generation was criminalising itself through anger and despair.
“It tugs at your heartstrings,” she said.
“To see children whose actions are going to place them completely outside of society. It’s painful to watch.”
Additional reporting by Paul Pradier and Pol Reygaerts
