French riots

Across France, more than 75,000 gilets jaunes [yellow vests] demonstrated all day on Saturday in cities or blocked roads and toll booths, with some briefly storming the runway at the Nantes airport and others blocking major motorway junctions or targeting prefects’ offices and tax offices.

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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, will hold an emergency meeting of senior ministers on Sunday after central Paris saw its worst unrest in a decade on Saturday. Thousands of masked protesters fought running battles with police, set fire to cars, banks and houses and burned makeshift barricades on the edges of demonstrations against fuel tax rises.

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On Sunday morning, Paris authorities hired extra trucks to begin removing the carcasses of burnt cars on from the scorched pavements of some of Paris’s most expensive streets, amid graffiti calling for Macron to resign.

Piles of teargas canisters littered broken pavements in front of rows of shattered shopfronts and smashed windows, as TV channels showed non-stop footage of central Paris in flames during Saturday’s events.

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Some 5,000 peaceful gilets jaunes demonstrators marched down the Champs Élysées at midday on Saturday, some carrying roses, many shouting: “Macron, resign!” and singing the national anthem.

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The spontaneous citizens’ movement, began in mid-November protesting against rising fuel taxes but it has morphed into a much broader anti-government and anti-Macron one challenging inequality and poor living standards.

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Violence erupted on the margins of [the] demonstrations.

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[B]y early afternoon, the Arc de Triomphe was surrounded by masked protestors fighting running battles with police. The interior minister Christophe Castaner said thousands of troublemakers unconnected to the peaceful demonstrations had deliberately come to “pillage, smash, steal, wound and even kill”. He called them rioters who were “professionals at causing disorder”.

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More than 400 people were arrested on Saturday, with over 300 still in police custody on Sunday. More than 130 people were injured, while one protester is in serious condition in a coma.

  The Guardian

On the margins. Masked. So who were the agitators?

UPDATE 12/4:  The French government is suspending the tax increase.