France faces reckoning with public order policing after violent protest weekend

French and international front pages kicked off the week Monday with images of the country in flames and headlines focused on “chaos” or “disaster” after polarising mass demonstrations rocked the country over the weekend.

Demonstrators marched across France on Saturday in massive protests drawing about 550,000 people, according to authorities while organisers put the turnout at 800,000. Following scenes of violence involving the police and certain demonstrators as well as looting, arson and at least 2,400 arrests, France is facing a debate over its maintien de l'ordre (public order) police doctrine.

Sparked in high schools in France’s overseas territories and taken up by schools in under-served Parisian suburbs, student blockades quickly spread across the country in recent weeks, with students demanding more resources for education and complaining about dilapidated infrastructure and a lack of teachers. The movement morphed this weekend into national demonstrations with unions, student organisations and activists hoping to revitalize the Yellow Vests movement, which emerged in November 2018 in protest of fuel prices and the high cost of living.

Read more'Finish what we started': After student protests, France braces for return of the Yellow Vests

Protests turned into scenes of turmoil and clashes with the police with many demonstrators reporting being sprayed with tear gas and police using “intermediary force” weapons which are used in crowd control by French law enforcement and have become a focal point of debate in recent weeks following several high school students being wounded in protests.

On Saturday, in Saint-Étienne in southeastern France, a 17-year-old lost his hand to a grenade while in Mulhouse, in the northeast, a young woman of the same age lost use of her eye. One protester died on the fringes of a demonstration in Paris following a “probable cardiac arrest” but local authorities said they did not yet know the circumstances surrounding his death.

Read moreSevere injuries at French student protests draw scrutiny to police tactics

‘Non-lethal weapons’

Prisca Ancion, a lawyer who works in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis and a member of Collectif d'Action Judiciaire – a collective of lawyers founded and run by members of hard-left party Révolution Permanente – has closely followed the high school student protest movement. She said the weekend’s protests showed how heavily armed the French police have become. 

“In 2026 we are at a point where the police have never been as armed and trained,” she said. “This is a consequence of a series of budgets which, while imposing austerity measures across a range of sectors – notably education – have allocated substantial funding to the police and armed forces.”

Ancion said special police units such as the CRS (the branch in charge of crowd and riot control) and the BAC (the anti-crime brigade) carry equipment classified as A2 – military-grade weapons – under France’s internal security code, including stun grenades, crowd dispersal grenades, rubber bullet launchers (also known as “flashballs” or “LBDs”) and tear gas labelled as “non-lethal”.

“In reality we should call them ‘less lethal’ weapons but they can be, at a minimum, mutilating,” she said.

Oliver Davis, a professor and head of the Department of French at University College Cork, said terms like “non-lethal” are “euphemisms”, and that these weapons, which entered French public order policing in the 1990s, can be extremely dangerous.

“They can create awful injuries if they're fired at the face, at the genitals or at soft parts of the body, they can ruin people's lives,” he said. “They are not 'sort of' toys, which is how they sometimes seem when they're described by the spokespeople of the policing forces.”

In an article for The Conversation, Davis traces the history of public order policing in France and the creation of the CRS at the end of World War II. According to him, these units tend to be far more militarised and confrontational than riot police in most other European countries. He added that Greece is one of few EU countries with a comparable approach in which de-escalation is not the guiding principle.

According to Olivier Cahn, a specialist of criminal law at the University Paris-Nanterre, there was a shift in national policy for crowd control in 2016 during the Nuit Debout (Up All Night) protest movement against proposed labour reforms, which came a year after the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks.

That shift was further formalised in 2025 with a "National Urban Violence Scheme” which led to an overall harsher policing doctrine.

“We have adopted a much more brutal policing doctrine, effectively consisting of a combination of kettling (corralling) tactics, extensive use of weapons – whether grenades or LBDs – and interventions within protests by law enforcement officers to bring protesters to justice,” he said. “We can see that the result is perhaps not an improvement in the quality of policing, but rather a considerable increase in the number of injured police officers and a sort of rallying of protesters against the police.”

For Davis, the early policing of the high schoolers’ movement reflected a failure by the Ministry of the Interior to restrain officers. In his view, the government paired heavy-handed policing tactics with “the pretence of listening” in an attempt to contain the movement. Instead, he said, images of injured teenagers have drawn more people into the protests.

‘Lack of anticipation’

On Saturday, some protesters also looted multiple stores and set fire to buildings – such as Limoges' city hall, the roof of which collapsed, or Lyon's tourism office.

President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Sunday that the country felt “anger” and “shame”, and that those responsible would be “held accountable”. He said he had told local prefects to work with mayors to protect public buildings and businesses, including by banning protests if necessary.

Read moreLive: France issues curfew for parts of central Paris

Macron also rejected Minister of the Interior Laurent Nunez’s offer of resignation, who said he “felt responsible for everything that happened”.

According to Cahn, French territorial intelligence services, those meant to “prevent and suppress urban violence”, had estimated about 200,000 demonstrators, far fewer than the at least half a million who turned out.

Nunez admitted there had been a “lack of anticipation” on Saturday and that the approximately 60,000 law enforcement staff deployed that day had been insufficient to deal with the large crowds, and that they had “lost control” in some cities.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked local authorities to impose “partial curfews” in certain cities Monday evening and said that the state of emergency could potentially be declared “if needed”. Some northern cities introduced curfews for Monday and Tuesday nights and authorities in the capital issued an overnight curfew in two neighbourhoods.

While it seems unlikely that the current doctrine of public order will be reexamined by the government given their recent statements, people in the French political sphere, particularly on the left, are increasingly calling it into question.

Green Party leader Marine Tondelier called for police doctrine to be "reviewed quickly", citing risks for both protesters and police officers and the infringement of civil liberties, while Marseille's socialist Mayor Benoît Payan called for "explanations" regarding the government’s approach to policing.