Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire on Monday accused the French government of orchestrating “a form of rotting of this social movement,” speaking two days after violent clashes erupted during the October 17 mobilization and continued into the following night in the capital.
Appearing alongside Marseille Mayor Benoît Payan on France Inter, the socialist official demanded “explanations” regarding the management of public order and the government’s political choices, as both city leaders questioned police tactics and staffing levels in the wake of widespread looting and destruction.
Mayors Demand Answers on Policing Strategy
“We are above all in a time of demands, of explanations,” Grégoire said, insisting it was now necessary to “understand what happened, what malfunctioned in terms of public order.” He pointed to a possible underestimation of the number of rioters and raised questions about the officers deployed on the ground.
The Paris mayor specifically criticized crowd-control tactics, including the use of “kettling that prevented thousands of good-faith demonstrators from coming on site while rioters infiltrated the margins of the demonstration.”
Payan, for his part, described the government’s public-order doctrine as “ineffective,” demanding answers from Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, whom he was due to meet Monday. Nunez had earlier acknowledged on France Inter “a lack of anticipation” and “a loss of control,” and revealed he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron, who refused it.
Marseille Mayor Disputes Rioter Figures
Payan said he wanted to “understand the doctrine for the use of law enforcement and crowd control in this country,” arguing that “this doctrine has changed. It is now ineffective. We see it—it prevents demonstrations from taking place.”
“I don’t understand why law enforcement set about firing tear gas, not at looters and rioters in Marseille, but at demonstrators,” he said.
The Marseille mayor also challenged the figure of 30,000 rioters in his city cited by the Bouches-du-Rhône police prefecture. “I don’t know what the prefecture is playing at,” he said. “I find this defense rather ridiculous. 30,000 is half the Stade Vélodrome.” He added that “police officers and prefecture officials themselves speak of 1,500.”
Looting Continues in Both Cities
On Saturday, Marseille city hall was briefly occupied by demonstrators before being dispersed by police. “It’s overwhelming,” Payan said. “A cordon of CRS made a movement I still cannot explain. I am still waiting for answers from the interior minister as to why there was a retreat by CRS that allowed rioters to enter the city hall.”
Looting continued “sporadically” in the city, the mayor added, though he stressed that the situation had calmed by Monday morning with forces properly deployed. “But I remain obviously very fearful and very attentive to what will happen.”
In Paris, Grégoire reported that “at least around thirty shopkeepers” were looted overnight from Sunday to Monday. “It doesn’t have the scale of Saturday, but there were unbearable scenes of groups of looters spreading across several neighborhoods,” he said, adding that he had spent the night in the field monitoring the situation. He also reported intrusions into building lobbies for “opportunistic theft” and access to rooftops to throw projectiles at police.
Unlike Saturday, the perpetrators were not hidden among demonstrators, Grégoire emphasized. “There, they act in the open. Let’s be serious—there were no demonstrations, there were just rioters,” he said.
Call for More Police Resources
Police carried out 351 arrests on Sunday and overnight in the capital, according to the interior minister. Grégoire questioned the resources deployed. “There are not enough public security forces in our cities,” he warned. “As soon as a situation spirals, police find themselves totally overwhelmed. That is incomprehensible.” He said he had requested meetings with Nunez and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
On Macron’s request for prefects to ban demonstrations, Grégoire was dismissive: “That has been available to any prefect for a very long time… I would dare say that for 2,000 years demonstrations could be banned. It is nothing new, and moreover it is not effective.” He noted that during Sunday’s unrest in Lyon and Paris, “there was no demonstration and there were still rioters.”
Both mayors insisted the debate must extend beyond security. “We cannot accept that this debate is just a debate on public order,” Grégoire said. “If there are rioters, it is because there are social movements.”
Payan called for compensation “down to the last cent” for damaged businesses. “In this Republic, it falls to the state to guarantee public tranquility and order. The state must now take its responsibilities so this does not happen again,” he said, adding that looted shopkeepers who “lost everything” must be compensated.
