Marseille braced for further unrest on Monday as France's second city counted the cost of a weekend of looting and violence that left hundreds of businesses smashed and more than a hundred people arrested.
Local business leaders say more than 500 premises were damaged, the majority of them looted, in what the BBC described as some of the worst disorder in France's modern history. In Marseille alone, 118 police officers were injured, more than a tenth of the national figure, and 101 people have been arrested, a quarter of them children.
By Monday police were the most conspicuous presence on the city's streets after demonstrations and gatherings were banned for eight hours in an effort to avoid a third consecutive day of disorder. An overnight curfew for minors will come into force in parts of the city from Tuesday evening, and more demonstrations are planned for the weekend.
The unrest began in September over poor school conditions before escalating to cover broader grievances including the cost of living. Maryame, an 18-year-old student who joined Saturday's march shortly after arriving in the city, described the solidarity of the earlier demonstration as "beautiful" and the violence that followed as "terrifying". She said she was conflicted over whether more violence would make the government listen. "France, our history is really based on revolution, and sometimes we really have to make a really big impact," she said. "Sometimes it goes too far."
For police, the collapse of order was a shock. "It was a war," said Arnaud Blaise of the UN1TE police union. "An unheard-of level of violence. Unprecedented." Blaise blamed far-left agitators known in France as the Black Bloc for provoking the disorder, saying young people from the city's deprived northern suburbs took the opportunity to loot. "The Black Blocs provoked, and the youngsters took advantage to start looting," he said. "That created chaos, with police officers running right, running left, and in effect, we got overwhelmed."
Denying accusations that officers were heavy-handed with peaceful students while sitting back as violent protesters pillaged local businesses, Blaise said more police than students had been injured. "Four thousand tear gas grenades were fired and then we ran out of ammunition. So at a certain point, you have no choice but to retreat."
The political fallout has reached the top of government. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, whose resignation in the wake of the riots was rejected by President Macron, travelled to Marseille on Monday evening and met the city's Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, at the City Hall, which protesters briefly occupied on Saturday. Payan called the handling of the weekend "a fiasco" from start to finish and demanded a radical change of police tactics. "If there isn't a radical change of approach on this issue, if, by chance, the only target remains high school students, then we will see looting scenes again," he said. "I don't know what's left to loot in Marseille, but for the little that remains, it will be looted."
Residents voiced concern about what the violence means for the city's young people. Chantal Bellanger, a 79-year-old grandmother who worked in the deprived northern suburbs, said France had "lost its grip on many things", including public services, hospitals and education, with peripheral neighbourhoods abandoned. "It's painful to watch," she said. "To see children whose actions are going to place them completely outside of society."