Is it a mere respite or the onset of fatigue? Fresh scenes of looting and sporadic violence continued to rock several towns in France on the night of Friday June 30 to Saturday July 1, but the riots seemed less virulent than on previous nights, four days after Nahel’s death. M., a teenager killed by police fire during a traffic check in Nanterre.
On a night trip to the police in Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines), the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, himself announced, around 2:30 a.m., violence of a “much less intensity ” with 471 arrests at the national level, and pockets of tension in particular in Marseille and Lyon.
“It’s the Republic that’s going to win, not the rioters,” he said, lamenting the young age of many of the rioters, “kids of 13, 14 years old (…) who obviously had better be at home rather than hanging out in the streets”.
In an attempt to stem the spiral of riots, the Minister announced in the afternoon, following a second interministerial crisis committee in two days, the “exceptional” mobilization of 45,000 police and gendarmes and elite units like the GIGN to avoid a fourth consecutive night of riots, a few hours before the burial of Nahel M. on Saturday in Nanterre. Dozens of police vans were thus positioned not far from the entrance to the Vieux-Pont district, the epicenter of urban violence and punctuated on Friday again by firework mortar fire.
The call for “appeasement” of the Blues and Kylian Mbappé
For their part, the players of the French football team sent a “call for appeasement, awareness and accountability” in the evening. “The time of violence must end to give way to that of mourning, dialogue and reconstruction”, urged the Blues in a message posted on the Twitter account to the 12.5 million subscribers of their new captain, Kylian Mbappe.
Seized by an amateur video that contradicted the initial story given by the police, the point-blank shooting of a police biker and the death of the 17-year-old teenager nevertheless continues to ignite many working-class neighborhoods in the country.
In the evening, Marseille was once again the scene of clashes and scenes of looting, from the city center then further north in these working-class neighborhoods that President Emmanuel Macron visited at the start of the week. Around 2 a.m., the police announced 88 arrests since the start of the evening, groups of young people, often masked and “very mobile” looting or attempting to do so several signs. A major fire, “linked to the riots”, according to a police source, broke out in a supermarket.
During the night, the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, asked the State, on Twitter, “the immediate dispatch of additional law enforcement forces” in order to fight against “acts of vandalism”.
Scenes of looting of shops and clashes between hooded demonstrators and the police also feverish the evening in certain corners of Grenoble, Saint-Etienne and Lyon. In the western region, points of tension were reported in Angers or Tours.
The Paris region was not spared by the flames, in particular Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine), enveloped in a strong smell of burning and where firefighters extinguished a burning car, noted a journalist from Agence France -Press (AFP) on site.
In Nanterre, nine people were arrested, carrying jerry cans and Molotov cocktails. In Saint-Denis, an administrative center was affected by a fire, and in Val-d’Oise, the town hall of Persan-Beaumont and the municipal police station caught fire and were partly destroyed.
Prohibited events and canceled events
To avoid overflows, Gérald Darmanin had asked the prefects to stop buses and trams throughout France after 9 p.m. The administrative court for its part validated on Friday the curfew put in place in Clamart (Hauts-de-Seine), and in fact those also established in other municipalities.
Demonstrations “against racism, crime and police violence” were also banned on Friday evening in Paris, in the center of Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, and even Toulouse. But several hundred people marched despite everything, especially in Montpellier, carrying signs “Dissolve the police, how many Nahel were not filmed?” “, noted two AFP journalists.
The government has also decided to cancel “large-scale” events, including Mylène Farmer’s concerts at the Stade de France on Friday and Saturday.
The Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, called for a “rapid, firm and systematic” criminal response against the perpetrators of urban violence but also their parents. Pointing to the youth of many rioters, Emmanuel Macron called on “all parents to be responsible”, criticizing the “instrumentalization” of Nahel’s death and asking social networks to “remove” content and identify him. their users.