France Deploys 70,000 Officers as a Fourth Protest Weekend Begins
Some 70,000 police and soldiers have been mobilised across France, a fifth more than last weekend, and 24 Paris metro stations are closed. Police banned the planned march from Bastille to Nation and the organisers’ legal appeal failed. Courts have overturned bans in Marseille and Limoges.
The Paris march has been confined to a route between two outer gates, from one until seven, though groups are preparing a two o’clock start instead; bans on unauthorised demonstrations remain in force in Lille, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Grenoble, Toulouse and Amiens. The reason given for the Bastille ban was the “high density of businesses similar to those targeted” the weekend before, when hundreds of shops were smashed and looted in Paris over two nights and thousands more across the country. Shopkeepers boarded up overnight — opticians, supermarkets, pharmacies. Meanwhile the National Rally is holding its congress in Orléans, with about 5,000 members today and ten thousand expected at a campaign launch tomorrow, against twenty to thirty thousand counter-demonstrators. The general secretary of the CGT union placed the blame squarely: this violence “comes from speeches that convey racism, anti-Semitism, violence, which essentially come from the speeches of the far right”. Parallel protests are planned today in Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Albania and Ireland.