French Riots Escalate as Macron Struggles to Respond

PARIS—A sharp escalation in riots after the fatal shooting of a teenager by police has thrust President Emmanuel Macron’s government into a confrontation with youth from France’s working-class suburbs, where frustration has long brewed over the treatment of minorities by law enforcement.

For the third consecutive night since the killing of a 17-year-old identified as Nahel M., rioters burned municipal and commercial buildings, while facing off with police in the towns around the French capital, with clashes as far away as Marseille, Reims and Lyon. A dozen buses were burned at a depot north of Paris, the French transportation minister said. Inside the city, video footage showed masked people breaking the windows of a major shopping mall.

The surge in violence forced Macron to cut short his visit to Brussels for a European Union summit and return to Paris to hold an emergency cabinet meeting, his second in two days. French authorities ramped up security and moved to curtail public transport and gatherings, from large concerts to end-of-school parties.

The French leader now faces a fresh crisis after struggling this spring to contain violent protests over his unpopular decision to raise the age of retirement. This time the unrest stems from years of tension between police and France’s working-class minorities, many of them Muslim, who reside in the country’s banlieues, or city outskirts.

Macron has condemned Nahel M.’s killing as inexcusable while calling for calm. Over the years, however, his government has shown steadfast support for law enforcement despite widespread criticism of police tactics as heavy-handed. Racial and religious tensions have also soared as Macron has restricted the activities of several mosques and Muslim associations that the government accuses of practicing “Islamist separatism,” an ideology that the government says aims to build a parallel society where religious rules override civil ones.

At the same time, the Macron government is coming under pressure from critics on the right to restore order. Some conservative and far-right politicians have begun calling on Macron to declare a state of emergency. Macron’s prime minister said all options were on the table.

Gérald Darmanin, his interior minister, deployed 40,000 police to the streets Thursday night, vowing a firm response to the violence. On Friday, a spokesman for the interior minister said 875 people had been detained. The majority of them are between 14 and 18 years old, French officials said.

“I call on fathers and mothers to shoulder their responsibility. It’s not the Republic’s job to do it for them,” Macron said, speaking at the end of his crisis meeting. He added that some of the young people taking part in riots looked like they “were reliving in the streets the videogames that have intoxicated them.”

Macron said that some of the violence appeared to have been organized on social media networks including Snapchat

Darmanin later summoned representatives of those companies as well as Meta Platforms and Twitter to a meeting where he pressed them to move more quickly in doing so, France’s Interior Ministry said.

Snapchat said that since Tuesday it had been removing content related to the French riots that violated its terms—including by promoting hatred or violence—but added that it allows content that is factually reporting on a situation. TikTok, Meta and Twitter didn’t immediately comment.

Ravina Shamdasani,

“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement,” she said.

France’s Foreign Ministry rejected the remarks as “totally baseless,” adding that French police show “great professionalism in facing situations and acts of great violence.”

The divide between the banlieues and police has stoked violence before. In 2005, France was rocked by three weeks of riots after two teenagers were electrocuted while hiding from police in an electrical substation.

The latest riots started Tuesday after a police officer shot and killed Nahel M., who was of Algerian descent, during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, authorities said.

French prosecutors on Thursday pressed preliminary charges of voluntary homicide against the police officer, after a preliminary investigation found that the officer didn’t use his weapon legally, said Pascal Prache,

Authorities shut down tram and bus services Thursday evening in an attempt to contain the violence. Rioters responded by taking the mayhem to the center of Paris and other cities. Stores were looted and public buildings vandalized, police said.

In Drancy, a Paris suburb, rioters used a truck to force open the entrance of a shopping mall, which was then partially burned.

In Marseille, rioters smashed windows and set fires in the city center and Vieux Port areas, sending plumes of black smoke into the evening sky. In Roubaix, a city in the north of France, an office building went up in flames. Meanwhile, in the southwestern city of Pau, a Molotov cocktail caused significant damage to a police outpost, the local prefect said.

Several towns in the Paris region began enforcing nighttime curfews on Thursday to stem violence, and have said they plan to continue them for the next few days. Later Friday, the government also said law enforcement would deploy armored vehicles to help stem the violence. 

Public transit will also be cut back across the country. In the Paris region, bus and tram service will now end at 9 p.m. until further notice, the local operator said. In Marseille, all public transit, including the metro, will close at 6 p.m., the operator said.

Education Ministry officials in Paris have ordered schools to cancel or reschedule any end-of-year school parties scheduled for Friday evening, because of the risk to schools from “spillover and riots” linked to the protests, according to a letter to school principals seen by The Wall Street Journal.

—Matthew Dalton contributed to this article.

Write to Stacy Meichtry at [email protected], Sam Schechner at [email protected] and Noemie Bisserbe at [email protected]