France’s prime minister said targeted curfews kept the peace overnight. More curfews will be decided Tuesday where needed.
PARIS — French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Tuesday that targeted curfews in Paris and other cities helped keep the peace overnight after a weekend of riots and looting. He said more curfews would be decided Tuesday evening in places where the situation requires them.
Nighttime curfews took effect Monday in cities including Paris, Bordeaux, Nice and Lyon. Police said the night passed without major incidents nationwide, according to TRT World. Some restrictions, including those in Paris, initially applied only from Monday to Tuesday. Lecornu thanked police officers and gendarmes for enforcing the measures in a post on X. He said new curfews would be decided on the ground by prefects in coordination with mayors.
More than 2,500 people have been arrested since the disorder began, officials said, and about 1,000 police officers were injured. AFP reported that a demonstrator’s hand was blown off by a police crowd-control grenade. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said dozens of judicial investigations are ongoing and that about 60,000 police and other security forces have been deployed across the country. He acknowledged that authorities were unable to suppress the riots in cities including Paris, Marseille and Lyon. The government has been accused of failing to anticipate and contain the violence.
President Emmanuel Macron rejected Nuñez’s offer to resign on Monday, citing the need for continuous command of law enforcement. He asked Nuñez to deploy new modes of action on the ground as soon as possible and to ensure transparency about failures in planning and intelligence-gathering. Lecornu said a state of emergency could be declared if necessary, but that partial curfews seemed more appropriate at this stage, Reuters reported.
The unrest grew out of student protests that began in mid-September at a high school in Créteil, a Paris suburb, over dilapidated buildings, overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages. The CGT union and other groups joined, and the movement widened to include demands over living costs and public services. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands marched, but violence broke out in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and other cities. In Limoges, a fire nearly destroyed the 19th-century city hall, and some schools were set on fire.
The response puts renewed attention on public security and on Macron’s leadership ahead of France’s presidential election in April. Whether localized curfews will contain the unrest remains to be seen, while the government faces continued scrutiny over its handling of the protests and the grievances behind them.