Masked protesters set fire to the 143-year-old town hall in Limoges on Saturday, and by midnight Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu was saying that 1,200 people had been arrested across France. Early reports carry a figure of 400, which was stale by bedtime. The bigger number is older: this is week four of a student revolt that had put 6,100 people in custody, most of them minors, by early October.
The Government’s Count
The Interior Ministry put turnout at 550,000, with 110,000 of them in Paris. France 24 logged about 400 arrests from the ministry at 7:59 p.m. Paris time. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 60 officers were hurt, two of them taken to hospital unconscious. At 11:56 p.m. Lecornu said 1,200 people were arrested and 150 officers injured.
Organizers and Local Officials
The CGT, France’s biggest union, said 800,000 people marched, and more than 600 demonstrations were organized nationwide. Lyon’s mayor, Grégory Doucet, said of the burned tourist office that “it breaks our hearts because it’s a very iconic, well-known historic building.” In Saint-Étienne a 17-year-old lost a hand to a grenade, and Nuñez said it may have been one used by a gendarme.
Limoges was the worst of it, not the only one. Protesters broke into Marseille’s town hall and looted shops there, forced their way into Lille’s town hall, and emptied an Apple store in Lille. In Paris, hooded groups burned a car in Place de la République and broke windows at the offices of CNews and Europe 1.
The Count Moved Faster Than the Coverage
Take the government’s own figures at face value, since those are the ones it will defend. Between France 24’s log entries at 7:59 and 11:56 p.m., arrests went from about 400 to 1,200. That is a tripling in under four hours. Officers hurt went from 60 to 150, though those come from two different officials, so part of that gap is who was counting. Set against the ministry’s 550,000 marchers, 1,200 arrests is 0.2 percent. The overwhelming majority of the people on the streets Saturday were not among those taken into custody.
The longer series is where the size shows. The Interior Ministry said early this month that 6,100 people had been arrested since the protests began, and the Justice Ministry said more than 1,800 were being prosecuted, 1,483 of them minors. One Saturday added 1,200, which works out to about a fifth of that earlier total in a single day (1,200 divided by 6,100). Lecornu’s office had by then counted at least 715 injured police officers and 215 injured teenagers.
It started in late September with high schoolers blockading classes over teacher shortages, deteriorating buildings and heavy schedules. Former yellow vests, farmers and unions have since joined.
What We Think Paris Is Getting Backward
Burning a town hall is arson. Prefect Maurice Barate called the Limoges fire a deliberate act by hooligans and said “the roof has collapsed onto lower floors, except the west wing, and two-thirds of the exterior has already disappeared.” Emmanuel Macron is right that those who attacked prefectures and looted town halls will be prosecuted and punished. Nothing about Saturday excuses the people who lit that fire.
Where we part ways with the government is the order of its priorities. A 15-year-old in Lens lost a hand to a grenade on October 5, and prosecutors said at the time that investigators had yet to establish whether he picked it up or it landed on him. Nuñez suspended police use of stun grenades two days later. On Saturday a 17-year-old in Saint-Étienne lost a hand to a grenade, and the minister’s own account is that it may have been a gendarme’s. The national police inspectorate has opened an investigation. We think a government that asks the country to treat Saturday as a law-and-order emergency owes the same urgency to that question, and a maybe from the Interior Minister is a placeholder, not an answer. In a month the argument has moved from a school short of teachers to 1,800 prosecutions, about four in five of them of minors.
The politics are already running. Jean-Luc Mélenchon marched, and Lecornu called his comments “dangerous and cynical”. Marine Le Pen has positioned the National Rally as backing the police. The first round of the presidential election is April 18, 2027, and Macron cannot run again. The figure that tells us whether Paris is governing or only counting is not Saturday’s 1,200. It is how fast the inspectorate says whose grenade it was.