Tear Gas in Paris as 110,000 March and Clashes Flare Across France

The day started calm and ended loud. Around 110,000 people marched through Paris on Saturday as part of nationwide protests, police said, but by evening demonstrators at Porte de Vincennes were hurling objects at officers and throwing up makeshift barricades. Riot police baton-charged masked youths who smashed the windows of a car dealership on the Cours de Vincennes, with thick clouds of tear gas and water cannon filling the air, according to the BBC's Paris correspondent.

Paris police said more than 3,000 bag checks were carried out and 65 people arrested in the capital. Authorities also wheeled out an elite unit normally reserved for organised crime and counter-terrorism, BRI-PP, alongside officers patrolling on motorbikes. About 70,000 police were mobilised across the country, and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez credited systematic bag searches with keeping a lid on things.

Outside the capital, the picture was messier in places. In Nantes, police said 41 people were apprehended over violence during what they called undeclared gatherings, with the local prefect insisting officers stay fully mobilised against looting. Bordeaux saw protesters tear boards off a shopfront to build barricades, and in Marseille a law enforcement vehicle drove straight through a burning barricade. In Grenoble, the local prefecture said nearly 400 masked individuals from the black bloc vandalised property and attacked police with mortars and projectiles at a demo organised by the CGT union and the yellow vest movement.

The crackdowns were lighter than last weekend, when several cities spiralled into looting and Marseille police ran out of gas canisters, per a police union rep. This time, many marches were banned or rerouted, and rain in Paris dampened the mood — umbrellas out instead of outright mayhem. Tear gas still flew in Marseille, Lyon and Nantes, as it typically does at the tail end of big French rallies.

Politics is fuelling the fire. The protests land ahead of France's 2027 presidential election, with Marine Le Pen on the nationalist right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the anti-capitalist left both jockeying for headlines. Le Pen thanked law enforcement on X, while Mélenchon accused centrist Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of being responsible for the chaos through either incompetence or a worst-case strategy — after Lecornu suggested student anger was being manipulated and warned of planned insurrections by small far-left and ultra-left groups.

In Orléans, where Le Pen's National Rally held its two-day congress, about 13,000 people marched peacefully against the party, local authorities said. Jordan Bardella was re-elected party president at the event, and Le Pen is expected to formally launch her 2027 campaign there. The unrest wasn't confined to France either — in Milan, police and military officers stopped and searched groups of teenagers to stop a protest from gathering.