Nearly 1,000 people were detained across France Saturday, the Interior Ministry said, as a wave of protests airing economic grievances returned to the streets of its major cities.
A massive police presence was met with some violent clashes in Marseille and Bordeaux as well as the capital, but the largely peaceful demonstrations were not marred by the scale of violence that erupted the previous weekend.
Around 110,000 of the over 410,000 protesters were in Paris, the ministry said, roughly the same number who demonstrated in the capital a week earlier.
Protesters have been calling for greater investment in the country’s education system, more opportunities for its young workers and solutions to surging living costs.
“In Paris, we had a major demonstration that took place peacefully, like most protest marches across the entire country,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told reporters, saying that almost 1,000 people were detained nationwide.
Nuñez said the police had restricted protesters’ movements. “They were prevented from staging unauthorized roving protests or heading toward city centers,” he said.
“In certain cities there was some damage or looting of businesses, in very limited numbers,” Nuñez added, but far less than during protests a week ago.
Nuñez said there had been “no targeted attacks” on public buildings such as town halls and police stations, as seen last weekend.
However, security forces faced an “extremely high level of violence,” Nuñez added, “with projectiles constantly being thrown and mortar fireworks fired.” He said security forces would remain deployed until very late Saturday evening local time to guard against looting.
Some 70,000 police officers had been mobilized across the country Saturday, the Interior Ministry said, as French authorities launched an enormous security operation for the second round of protests.
Specialist SWAT units, helicopters, armored vehicles, police dogs and water cannon were at the ready as part of the operation, after more than half a million people took to the streets last Saturday.
After a peaceful march through Paris, a crowd of several thousand protesters confronted police, who used tear gas and a water cannon to block them, according to a CNN team at the scene.
The clashes broke out at the Porte de Vincennes, the endpoint of the march.
In France’s second city Marseille, protesters launched mortar fireworks toward police during running street skirmishes, and there were reports of looting in various parts of the city, including a jewelry store with smashed windows and a supermarket being pillaged, CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV reported.
Images from Bordeaux, on France’s Atlantic coast, showed tear gas being used against protesters in the famous Place de la Bourse. Videos showed some masked protesters hurling objects at police as the tear gas drifted across the square.
In Nice, dozens of far-right activists attacked people protesting peacefully Saturday, BFMTV reported.
The leader of far-left party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, warned that nationwide industrial action will take place on November 5 if French President Emmanuel Macron does not respond to protesters’ demands.
“A general strike… looms over the government for the 5th of November,” he told BFMTV, while speaking from the front line of Saturday’s demonstration in Paris.
As scores of protesters took to the streets in cities across France on Saturday, anti-government demonstrations were also taking place in a number of other European countries.
In the Italian cities of Naples, Rome and Milan, stores boarded up their windows ahead of planned protests, after looting at earlier demonstrations.
Protesters in the Albanian capital Tirana set fire to dumpsters and threw stones and tear gas canisters.
And in Brussels, students held up placards and barricaded streets. Police deployed a water cannon, according to Belgium’s public broadcaster VRT.
CNN’s Catherine Nicholls, Lisa Courbebaisse, Joseph Ataman, Tim Lister, Elina Baudier Kim and Charlotte Reck contributed reporting.
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