Today · World Post
Just before 1am on Monday morning, two motorbikes carrying one passenger each stopped at a traffic light on a backstreet near rue de Rivoli, one of central Paris’s busiest shopping streets. “You’ve got to go where there are a lot of people, where they’ve done the shop windows,” said one motorbike rider to another. Minutes later 10 other men, their faces covered with ski balaclavas, came down the street on foot pursued by a police van.
Soon after Emmanuel Macron’s televised speech on Sunday night telling the nation it was “unbearable to see our streets ransacked”, groups of men looted shops in central Paris for hours for a second night running. Dozens of people attempted to smash windows near Les Halles shopping centre and grab goods. Others broke into an electrical shop in Belleville in the north of the city.
People enter a ransacked Franprix store as clashes erupted at Place de la République. Photograph: Matthieu Rondel/AFP/Getty Images “Men were battering shop windows, trying to break in, then they were chased by police,” said a 73-year-old woman near Les Halles. “There were different groups running everywhere with police chasing on foot or by car, and at the same time, some people were setting bins and bikes alight.
The groups breaking into shops aren’t hostile to passersby so you’d see local residents walking down the street on their way home late at night, and masked teenagers running past in the other direction carrying looted goods. It’s so strange – it’s like two different universes in parallel worlds.” A shopkeeper clears up in front of a damaged shop on Sunday. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images She said: “It says a lot about society – it shows we have neglected our education system and that we’re living in a consumer society where all we say to our young people is: ‘buy, buy, buy’.
In this type of extreme capitalism, some people don’t have enough money to buy all of this and so they attack.” Nearby, an optician’s shop on rue Beaubourg had had its window smashed and the whole glass front dragged out on to the pavement. Its spectacle shelves had been emptied. An optician’s on rue Beaubourg in central Paris on Monday.
The graffiti says: ‘Burn the prisons.’ Photograph: Angelique Chrisafis/The Guardian The looting in Paris and other cities across France had begun on Saturday. That day, police faced three distinct groups. First, peaceful demonstrators calling for better funding for schools and public services marched calmly in cities cross France, including schoolchildren, parents, grandparents and teachers.
Separately to those peaceful protesters, other groups made barricades of burning bikes, clashed with police and targeted state buildings, such as the town hall in the central city of Limoges , in what local mayors described as unprecedented violence. Finally, looters had run around city streets smashing shop windows and taking goods. The police appear to have been taken by surprise by a second night of looting in central Paris on Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday.
A looted Salomon store in La Marais district. Photograph: Nik Erik Neubauer/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock The identities of looters was not known. Some people seen looting in central Paris over the weekend appeared to be teenagers.
Some had struggled to carry many shoeboxes in their arms as they ran down the street from a smashed designer trainer shop in the Marais area. But there was also a large presence of masked adult men. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, on Monday said that men arrested in vandalised shops on Saturday night included a 34-year-old who had previous convictions for criminal damage, theft, violence and driving offences.
Others included a 46-year-old carrying clothes from a shop, a 23-year-old drunk man allegedly carrying the keys of a stolen scooter and a 19-year-old arrested while he was hiding in the changing room of a vandalised shop, and who had previous convictions for drug-dealing. Bicycles and street debris in Paris after a day of violent clashes between police and protesters on Sunday morning. Photograph: Ibrahim Ezzat/Anadolu/Getty Images In some parts of central Paris with no police presence on Saturday night, dozens of people had been seen running with armfuls of shoes or perfume boxes.
On Sunday morning, some shopping streets in Paris woke up to smashed glass and piles of empty shoeboxes where looters had grabbed designer trainers and run, or even boxes of hair-dye. Shops that advertised buying and selling gold near Place de la République had signs and windows smashed as groups tried to break in. Firefighters extinguish burning e-bikes in Paris The fact that looting had continued for a second night worried shopkeepers on Monday morning.
Some had tried to protect their businesses. Others were emptying stock. An Adidas shop near Les Halles in central Paris was packing its contents into a large van on Monday morning to avoid theft.
“Don’t worry, we’re not looters,” said the removal men to passersby as they wheeled out racks of tracksuits. At Paris’s Place de la République police had fired teargas and charged as crowds of hundreds of people had gathered to stand in the square on Sunday afternoon. Into the night on Sunday, further up boulevard de Sébastopol, dozens of people had shouted anti-police slogans and thrown glass bottles in the direction of officers.
On Monday morning, burnt bikes and scooters were piled up on street corners and the road had patches of melted asphalt. Graffiti along the roads leading from République included “Tax the Rich” outside a bank whose windows had been smashed. Photograph: Tonny Linke/NurPhoto/Shutterstock “It looks like a war zone around here,” said a one charity worker near Place de la République on Monday morning as he looked at a burnt-out cafe-bar north of the main square, which had been torched on Saturday.
“There’s a general angst out there and people want to make that known, you can’t deny it. But people who are smashing and destroying things, that’s taking it too far.” A digital special effects worker with an office nearby said: “This was the bar where we often went for a drink after work. There are looters who are taking advantage of the demonstrations to create chaos ...
We don’t know when this is going to end. There has always been a bit of trouble in Paris after protests, but this is on a whole different scale.”
Source: The Guardian
