French police arrest more than 1,800 after cost-of-living protests

French police made more than 1,800 arrests after Oct. 17 cost-of-living protests across France, according to a Guardian opinion piece and linked live coverage published Sunday.

The demonstrations increased pressure on President Emmanuel Macron’s government: the Guardian article said 550,000 to 800,000 people marched as petrol, a trigger for the 2018 gilets jaunes, or yellow vest, movement, reached a record €2.4 a litre at the end of September.

Oliver Haynes, a journalist and co-host of the Sacré Bleu podcast, said in the Guardian opinion piece that he reached Place de la République just after 1 p.m. Saturday and saw the mood change when police fired teargas from Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple. “I didn’t see the inciting incident – if there even was one,” he wrote.

On Boulevard de Magenta, Haynes said he met a Sorbonne student who had come to “support the highschoolers first and foremost, and to demand more money in public schools, from primary schools to universities”. The student also cited police treatment of under-18 pupils, including a reported incident in Lens involving a 15-year-old and a police grenade.

By about 4 p.m., Haynes said he saw stun grenades, protesters throwing bottles at police, a burning car and the looting of a Nicolas wine-shop branch. He described the crowd at that point as a mix of black bloc activists, gilets jaunes supporters, people angry at the government and police, and young men looking for confrontation.

The protests add to a broader social dispute that Atlas360 reported on Oct. 17, when images from Paris, Marseille and other French cities showed clashes, road blockades and property damage as price pressures fed public anger. Haynes wrote that people he spoke to included union workers, lycée students and citizens angered by living costs.

The political contest around the unrest has already begun. Marine Le Pen, in a statement cited by Haynes, described French people as caught between the “austerity and fiscal hammering of those in power and the insurrectionary activists” and promised to “free” them “from Macronist toxic policies and protect them from the violence of the far left”.

Haynes wrote that the French left, chiefly represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was defending protesters and seeking to direct the anger into the presidential campaign by focusing on police violence rather than violence by rioters.

The account has limits. The Guardian opinion piece did not include an official police explanation for the first use of teargas at Place de la République, and Haynes said he did not see any incident that may have preceded it.

The Guardian article said the government appeared determined to continue with its budget despite the unrest, while the scale of arrests and the size of the Oct. 17 marches left the immediate legal and political fallout unresolved.

Source: opinion piece and live coverage, The Guardian, Oct. 18; Atlas360 reporting, Oct. 17-18.