French President Emmanuel Macron led a crisis meeting on Sunday after anti-government protests in Paris that left 263 people injured and widespread destruction around the capital.
Mr. Macron met with the Prime Minister, Interior Minister and top security service officials at the presidential palace in Paris after flying in from the G20 summit in Argentina.
He earlier visited the Arc de Triomphe, a monument to France’s war dead, and other scenes of violence where he paid tribute to the police but was also booed by sections of the crowd.
Paris police said 412 people were arrested on Saturday during the worst clashes for years in the capital and 378 were still in custody.
133 still in custody
A total of 133 had been injured, including 23 members of the security forces who battled rioters for most of the day in some of the most famous parts of the capital.
“I will never accept violence,” Mr. Macron told a news conference in Buenos Aires before flying home. “No cause justifies that authorities are attacked, that businesses are plundered, that passers-by or journalists are threatened or that the Arc du Triomphe is defiled.”
As protests took place across the country, a motorist died overnight after crashing a van into traffic which had built up due to a “yellow vest” demonstration in Arles, southern France, a local prosecutor said on Sunday.
The so-called “yellow vest” anti-government protests that have swept France over the last fortnight were sparked initially by a rise in taxes on diesel.
In a separate incident, a motorway pay booth was set on fire by arsonists in southern France near the city of Narbonne, a judicial source said on Sunday. Five people were taken into custody, a prosecutor said.
The main north-south motorway in eastern France, the A6, was also blocked by protesters near the city of Lyon on Sunday morning, its operator said.
The capital was calm, however, but as groups of workers moved around cleaning up the mess from the previous day, the scale of the destruction became clear. Around famous areas including the Champs-Elysees, the Louvre museum, the Opera and Place Vendome, smashed shop windows, broken glass and the occasional burned-out car were testament to the violence. No At the Arc de Triomphe graffiti had been daubed, with one slogan saying: “The yellow vests will win.”
Mr. Macron faces a dilemma in how to respond to the “yellow vests”, not least because they are a grass-roots movement with no formal leaders and a wide range of demands.
No rolling back
He has so far refused to roll back taxes on fuel, which he says are needed to fund the country’s transition to a low-emission economy. And he remains a fervent defender of the tax cuts he has delivered for businesses and the wealthy, which he believes were necessary to lower the high unemployment.
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner attributed the violence to “specialists in sowing conflict, specialists in destruction”. He did not rule out imposing a state of emergency — a demand made by the police union Alliance — declaring: “Nothing is taboo for me. I am prepared to examine everything.”
Despite the violence, opinion polls suggest the protests still attract the support of two out of three French people.
