France sees another weekend of mass protests as thousands rally across Europe

By Jonny Hallam, Issy Ronald, CNN

(CNN) — Nearly 1,000 people were detained across France Saturday as a wave of largely-peaceful protests airing economic grievances returned to the streets of its major cities, mirroring similar demonstrations across Europe.

A massive police presence was met with some violent clashes in Marseille and Bordeaux as well as the capital, but the demonstrations were not marred by the scale of violence that erupted the previous weekend.

The mass protests that have emerged across Europe in recent weeks share some common grievances – the rising cost of living, housing crises and lack of funding for education – though they vary in scale and in which issue they prioritize from country to country.

France has consistently seen some of the continent’s biggest protests. Around 110,000 of the over 410,000 protesters on the streets on Saturday were in Paris, the interior ministry said, roughly the same number who demonstrated in the capital a week earlier. An NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and New Orleans Saints went ahead Sunday at the Stade de France just outside Paris, but a fan event in the capital was canceled.

A wave of protests across Europe

Tens of thousands marched in Madrid, Spain on Saturday, calling for public pensions to be protected, according to national broadcaster RTVE, while Portuguese police said they cleared an encampment which had sprung up in central Lisbon and Porto as people protested the country’s housing crisis.

While almost all of the rallies in Europe’s cities stayed largely peaceful, there were pockets of disorder and clashes with authorities. In Barcelona, officials said they arrested 128 people following riots and looting.

Around 600 people “not following any demonstration, not taking part in any demonstration, and not defending any of the usual causes or rights” gathered in central Barcelona on Saturday evening, said Núria Parlon, Catalonia’s interior minister.

Footage showed some small, scattered fires burning, and being extinguished, as well as some shattered shop windows. One group of rioters even managed to enter an Urban Outfitters store after smashing through its windows. Another group were filmed trying to break into a jewelry store on La Rambla, one of Barcelona’s most popular shopping streets. Fourteen police officers were injured, four of them seriously, police said.

In total, 23 businesses were vandalized after several groups of hooded people gathered in the central Plaza de Catalunya area at about 6 p.m. local time, the Catalan police force said.

While Parlon emphasized that these individuals weren’t part of any demonstration, Barcelona’s Mayor Jaume Collboni said “it may be connected to some of the calls being made in several European capitals.”

In the Italian cities of Rome, Milan and Naples, stores boarded up their windows after looting at earlier demonstrations but the protests against the rising cost of living and war were smaller than expected.

Italian authorities had bolstered security forces in Milan with hundreds of military troops who conducted searches and confiscated baseball bats, fireworks and face masks from scores of protesters. A number of protesters were also taken in for questioning and not allowed to join planned marches, according to local media.

Protesters in Turin, Bologna and Florence scuffled with security forces, which used batons and tear gas to push back groups that tried to rush barriers, according to local media which showed images of bleeding protesters.

Protesters in the Albanian capital Tirana, who have been demanding better support for education and the prime minister’s resignation, set fire to dumpsters and threw stones and tear gas canisters.

And in the Belgian capital of Brussels, students held up placards and barricaded streets. Police later deployed a water cannon to disperse crowds, according to the country’s public broadcaster VRT.

France’s huge security operation prevents repeat of last weekend

In Paris, the demonstration “took place peacefully, like most protest marches across the entire country,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told reporters, saying that almost 1,000 people were detained nationwide.

Nuñez said the police had restricted protesters’ movements. “They were prevented from staging unauthorized roving protests or heading toward city centers,” he said.

“In certain cities there was some damage or looting of businesses, in very limited numbers,” Nuñez added, but far less than during protests a week ago.

Nuñez said there had been “no targeted attacks” on public buildings such as town halls and police stations, as seen last weekend.

However, security forces faced an “extremely high level of violence,” Nuñez added, “with projectiles constantly being thrown and mortar fireworks fired.” He said security forces would remain deployed until very late Saturday evening local time to guard against looting.

Some 70,000 police officers had been mobilized across the country Saturday, the Interior Ministry said, as French authorities launched an enormous security operation for the second round of protests.

Specialist SWAT units, helicopters, armored vehicles, police dogs and water cannon were at the ready as part of the operation, after more than half a million people took to the streets last Saturday.

After a peaceful march through Paris, a crowd of several thousand protesters confronted police, who used tear gas and a water cannon to block them, according to a CNN team at the scene.

The clashes broke out at the Porte de Vincennes, the endpoint of the march.

In France’s second city Marseille, protesters launched mortar fireworks toward police during running street skirmishes, and there were reports of looting in various parts of the city, including a jewelry store with smashed windows and a supermarket being pillaged, CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV reported.

Images from Bordeaux, on France’s Atlantic coast, showed tear gas being used against protesters in the famous Place de la Bourse. Videos showed some masked protesters hurling objects at police as the tear gas drifted across the square.

In Nice, dozens of far-right activists attacked people protesting peacefully Saturday, BFMTV reported.

The leader of far-left party France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who joined the Paris march, warned protests were likely to continue if French President Emmanuel Macron doesn’t respond to protesters’ demands.

“It is time for the authorities to yield; otherwise, the only option left to them will soon be the exit door,” he said in a post on X.

Earlier Saturday, Mélenchon told BFMTV from the front line of the demonstration that Macron risks further nationwide industrial action on November 5 unless he “gives in now.”

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CNN’s Elina Baudier Kim, Lisa Courbebaisse, Joseph Ataman, Barbie Latza Nadeau, Catherine Nicholls, Tim Lister, Pau Mosquera and Charlotte Reck contributed reporting.