France Curfews Called After Riots Police Admit Losing Control

France curfews are back in the headlines after a weekend of riots that the government itself admits it did not see coming. On Monday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked regional authorities to impose "local and partial" curfews in hit cities, while insisting that Paris will not be put under a blanket lockdown.

What Lecornu actually asked for

According to The Guardian, Lecornu spoke after an emergency cabinet meeting and said he was fully resolved to restore public order. He said there was no question of imposing a full curfew on an entire city such as Paris. A state of emergency is still on the table, he added, but at this stage partial curfews seemed more appropriate.

The details are thin. He did not say which cities would be covered or what form the France curfews would take, only that prefects, the government's regional representatives, would decide on very limited and localized measures. Marseille already went a step further, with its prefect banning any protest or gathering from noon to eight in the evening on Monday, according to the AP report carried by PBS NewsHour.

How a school protest became a national riot

This did not start as a riot. It began weeks ago with high school students furious about the state of their schools, with sometimes violent clashes with police along the way. By Saturday it had snowballed into nationwide demonstrations over the rising cost of living, with students, teachers, parents, unions and workers all marching.

The numbers show how badly the state misjudged it. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said intelligence pointed to about two hundred thousand demonstrators, but more than five hundred thousand turned up. Sixty thousand police and other security forces were deployed, and it still was not enough against organised, highly mobile groups in Paris, Marseille and Lyon.

The damage and the arrests

Authorities say nearly two thousand four hundred people were arrested, around seventy percent of them adults, and almost one thousand police and gendarmes were injured. About two thousand shops were ransacked, and Lecornu has put the number of looted or vandalized businesses even higher, at roughly three thousand. Flames engulfed the nineteenth-century city hall in Limoges, collapsing its roof.

Lecornu called it a miracle that nobody was killed. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said many of those detained already had police records and that about eighty percent were being prosecuted. Macron, in a televised address on Sunday, promised that those who destroyed must pay and those who looted must reimburse.

Police admit they lost control

The most striking part is the confession. Nuñez said police "lost control" in some major cities and blamed a lack of anticipation. He offered his resignation, saying he felt responsible for everything that happened. Macron refused it and instead ordered a full review of the planning and intelligence failures plus new tactics on the ground, as AP reported.

Not everyone buys the government line. Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said it was the state that was at fault this weekend and warned that the protests will continue. Marseille mayor Benoît Payan called the situation almost insurrectional. Protesters even blocked the entrances to the Louvre on Monday, so the museum could not open on schedule.

Why it matters beyond France

The timing is brutal for Macron's camp, with a presidential election about six months away and economic pressure mounting. The Guardian notes that cost-of-living protests also hit Italy, Belgium and Albania over the weekend, so this is not only a French story. Gen Z is right in the middle of it, since the movement started with teenagers angry about their classrooms.

The big question is whether France curfews calm things down or feed the anger. Mayors say there is no political way out yet, and one protest movement is already calling for another round of demonstrations on Saturday. Expect the next few nights to show whether the government has regained its footing. For wider context on unrest, see our world coverage.