France braced for more riots after third night of violence

Receive free France updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest France news every morning.

The French government is facing a spiralling crisis after a third night of unrest sparked by the police killing of a teenager at a traffic stop in a Paris suburb this week, with more than 600 arrests overnight as protesters lit fires and targeted public buildings.

President Emmanuel Macron cut short a trip to Brussels for an EU summit on Friday and was returning to the capital for a second crisis meeting in as many days to tackle rioting that erupted just months after mass demonstrations over a deeply unpopular pensions reform. 

Multiple protests took place in the suburbs of Paris, including in Nanterre where Nahel, a 17-year-old of North African origin, was killed in a car as he tried to speed away from police on Tuesday. In central Paris, shops including a Nike store were looted, images on social media showed, buses were destroyed and schools attacked.

The government has so far stopped short of calling a state of emergency, used in the past after major terror attacks and which would grant authorities and law enforcement special powers. Prime minister Élisabeth Borne said on Friday “all options would be examined”.

“Our priority is returning order to the whole territory,” Borne added, ahead of the crisis meeting in the early afternoon.

Cars were set on fire in cities from Marseille to Lyon and the outskirts of Lille, despite police deploying 40,000 officers, heavy-duty armoured vehicles and in some cases elite squads used in counter-terrorism to try to quell the unrest. Nearly 80 police stations across the country were targeted by attacks, the interior ministry said.

“Last night, our police officers, gendarmes and firemen once again bravely faced a rare level of violence. In line with my instructions to be firm, they carried out 667 arrests,” said interior minister Gérald Darmanin on Twitter. That was more than three times as many arrests as the previous night. 

The protests have raised questions over how major sporting events such as the Tour de France cycling race, which starts across the Spanish border in Bilbao on Saturday, will proceed in the coming days. The riots also coincided with the start of the summer holiday season in France, with people set to criss-cross the country by road.

So far, concerts and other events even in suburbs affected by riots have gone ahead. But on Thursday in the Paris region some transport services were terminated in the early evening to prevent them from being attacked, while various neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital brought in curfews.

Transport minister Clément Beaune said attacks on some transport services had been worse than the night before, with 12 buses destroyed by fires in one warehouse in Aubervilliers, just outside Paris. 

Opponents of the government across the political spectrum have attacked Macron’s administration over the teenager’s killing. Those on the left have criticised police tactics, accusing them of racial discrimination and excess brutality, while those on the right have berated the government over its inability to restore order and have called for a tougher crackdown.

The hard-left Nupes alliance in parliament has called for a change to a subset of a 2017 law that allows police to fire when absolutely necessary in circumstances such as when citizens refuse to comply with an order.

The outrage over Nahel’s death has echoes of serious riots in 2005, when two teenagers from low-income suburbs died while fleeing from police. It has revived the simmering anger in neighbourhoods that are home to many immigrants and their descendants, where inequalities in areas from housing to jobs are marked. 

The outcry over the shooting grew quickly after a video emerged of the incident, which showed no apparent immediate threat to the two officers who flagged down the teenager. The police officer who fired the fatal shot has been placed in pre-trial detention, a rare step, and investigating magistrates have filed preliminary charges of voluntary homicide. 

The two officers had pursued Nahel on motorbikes after noticing a young driver speeding down a bus lane and running lights, according to accounts by the policemen and one passenger relayed by the Nanterre prosecutor. The officers caught up with him in traffic and one shot him as he tried to pull away. 

No weapons or drugs were found in the car, the prosecutor added. Nahel, who was driving without a licence, had a history of refusing to stop for police, the prosecutor said. But lawyers for Nahel’s family, who have called for more action against the second policeman, said the teenager had never been sentenced for any crime. 

Nahel’s mother Mounia, who appeared at a demonstration in Nanterre on Thursday holding a flare and wearing a T-shirt bearing the words “Justice for Nahel”, told France 5 she wanted “very firm” justice for her son. 

“I’m not angry at the police, I’m angry with one person, the one who took my son’s life away,” she said in the TV interview on Thursday night. “It’s the fault of one man, not a whole system. [Nahel] looked like a young Arab and he took his life away.”

A lawyer for the policeman who fired the shot said the officer was devastated and had not intended to kill the teenager, and had expressed his sorrow for the family. But he claimed that the officer had acted within the law and had feared the car would crush the policemen and endanger others.

“When you have killed someone, evidently you regret it . . . but my client says he could not have done any differently,” Laurent-Franck Lienard told BFM TV.