France protests: "There's a whole range of grievances at play"

France woke up this morning to devastated streets after nationwide protests on Saturday. The demonstrations were against the rising cost of living and deteriorating working and studying conditions. It began with peaceful marches attended by hundreds of thousands. But they quickly degenerated into violence in some parts, with clashes between police and protesters, as well as mass looting and fires. Similar scenes also took place beyond Paris in Marseille, Lyon and Limoges. where town halls were torched and vandalized. Massive cleanup operations have begun in Paris, as well as Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nice and Toulouse as well. The Interior Ministry says more than 500 police officers were injured, over 1,800 people arrested and that at least one protester has died. Let's hear first from some residents and tourists waking up to the aftermath today. It's like a war zone here. I've been here for 40 years. I have never seen anything like this. Never. Gas even got inside. We couldn't breathe. We had to wear masks. There is a lot of anger. There is a lot of difficulty in living and studying. So I believe it's legitimate. And of course, in this legitimate protest, sometimes there are violent people that take advantage but i think it's very minor i wouldn't i wouldn't use the word revolution but something i think they wanted to to put the the country into a real chaos and to uh to destroy everything and all what is the democracy and all the you know beautiful building like city hall and all that stuff for french politicians have weighed in emmanuel macron's government and far right presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, have both blamed ultra-left groups for the violence. Meanwhile, a far-left presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who'd backed the demonstrations, had urged protesters to stay away from any looting. We're expecting comments from President Macron on all that at 8 p.m. Paris time tonight. We'll of course be bringing you that to you live on France 24. Well, let's get some analysis now of yesterday's events. And joining us is Joseph Downing, lecturer at Aston University. Joseph, a pleasure as always to have you with us on the show. First, I'd like your analysis on what we witnessed yesterday between the peaceful protests and the violence we saw. And is the anger driven more by the actual declining living standards or by the perception that the economic burden is perhaps distributed unfairly? I would say it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think one of the interesting things that we need to do today is to nuance these protests and to be clear that there's a whole range of grievances at play and many different protesters are going with many different reasons into the streets and feeling unsatisfied. I think France is in a very difficult situation, pretty much like most established democracies in that they're basically at the whim of global inflationary pressures that the central government can't really do much about. So people can go into the streets and they can protest, But there's no clear, simple answer. There's no straight path forward to reduce the cost pressures on average citizens. There's not a huge amount of spare money to plough into public services and to universities and into schools. So it's really difficult to see what the way out of this of this current crisis is. So yesterday brought together unions and students and elements of the Yellow Vest movement as well. Why are they finding common ground now? well i mean because we're in we're in probably the most difficult economic period maybe in the past 15 20 years i mean since since the great financial crisis of 2008 2009 um we're in the toughest economic period since then because of these inflationary pressures and it's it's easy for individuals i think to find common ground currently um because people feel poorer people feel poorer people feel as if um their money is not going as far they feel as if their living standards are dropping and they don't see this as something that that was is a one-off blip in the post-covid past post-war in ukraine years because of global events so covid the war in ukraine and now donald trump's sort of uh failure of of an attempt to to subjugate iran now i mean that prices are just continuingly continuing to increase and salaries are not catching up with that and i think people feel that this is not just a blip but this is a broader trend they don't really see a way out of. Now, all of this is, of course, reminiscent of the Yellow Vest protests we saw back in 2018 against the rising fuel costs and the cost of living. How similar are these to what we saw yesterday? And what are the key differences? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of similarities. I think you hit on a really good point there in that, you know, the Yellow Vest protests were sparked by a rise in diesel prices. I mean, that now seems like a really insignificant price rise compared to the dramatic price rise as we've seen um in the past six months um but i think that this is tapping into something broader the yellow vest movement started over something quite specific but also broadened out to a general sense of discontent in france and i think that's kind of what we're seeing happen here we're seeing that this these rounds of protests were sparked by protests over issues in education and problems with schools and universities And it's now been joined by those that have much broader concerns about the standard of living, the price of petrol, you know, a range of different concerns that people can find common ground over. So Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has condemned some rioters for targeting what he called the centres of power. Let's just take a listen to what he said. All day long, fellow citizens faced a violent, far-left, a highly organized network that sought to attack property, people and the institutions of the Republic. Clearly, the centers of power in Paris were targeted, the Élysée Palace, Matignon and the National Assembly. So this is clearly a political maneuver that accepts violence, and as I said earlier, and I'll say it again, we will not be intimidated. So, Joseph, we just heard Prime Minister Lecornu there commenting on the attacks on French institutions. Now, this is a bit of a deja vu, isn't it, this anger at the establishment? So in the light of this and the Yellow Vest Movement resurfacing again, what would you say that Macron government has failed to understand since 2018? I mean, is it a problem of policy, communication, or even a deeper failure to respond to ordinary people's lived experiences? no and i think this is a really worrying moment i mean we can see with the destruction of the town hall in Limoges we can see with the sacking of the town hall in Marseille that this is a really dangerous development in that the protesters and are going after directly the the the places where power is held locally i mean we have to understand this in the context of France's revolutionary traditions uh those outside of France perhaps are not that that familiar with the fact that you know it's seen as your right and your duty as a French citizen to challenge power to challenge the state to storm the Bastille shall we say in a kind of modern sense but this is deeply worrying right and i mean i think the Macron government i don't know if it's so important whether they've heard or not people's grievances i just think that they're in a situation where there's not much that they can really do i mean France France's public finances are extremely strained uh they had a massive budget overshoot last year Macron came in on a platform as a reformer and he's had a very mixed record at that he hasn't managed to get government spending down dramatically he called a snap election which proved to be a pretty a pretty disastrous political gamble so he doesn't really have the presidential power that he had earlier on in his presidency to make dramatic uh policy moves nor does he have the wiggle room in terms of the finances and i think whether or not the government hears people understands their grievances and communicates well which i don't think that they do that that's one thing i think you pick up on there which i think is is spot on in that you know Macron and his circle are not that in tune to the struggles of people's lives but there's actually not really much that they can do Joseph thank you so much for bringing us your insight there we're going to have to leave it there but thank you for your time today well let's get some aftermath of today and our reporter antonio kerrigan is a plaster public for us the epicenter of the clashes Antonia tell us what you're seeing there today give us an idea of the extent of the damage well you see uh completely destroyed shop fronts shops with you know despairing owners in them we actually spoke to some of those owners one of whom had a shop selling glasses and he said that the attacks on his shop the vandalism and the looting continued late into the night beyond midnight there was also a neighboring restaurant where they had boarded up the the windows to prevent looting and found that they had been the boards had been ripped off and the shop at the restaurant was looted multiple times during the course of the evening of course sanitation workers have been here at Place de la République since the middle of the night they were deployed extremely quickly and you are seeing a gradual improvement certainly in the public spaces that are being cleaned up by these workers however private businesses it's going to be a much longer road an extremely heavy bill a representative of a shop owners union said today that about 1500 shops have been affected nationwide and that the bill would be in the hundreds of millions which seems credible given the scale of the damage we've seen and given that we consider the damage and of course the contents of all these shops all of their merchandise that they were selling and certainly the situation is improving here as these sanitation workers continue to clean up but there's also significant damage to property that will take a lot longer you know there are things like a lot of the traffic lights around this square are not functioning correctly and we can assume it's an assumption at this stage but we can imagine that that must be the result of some of that vandalism last night. Antonio thank you so much for bringing us those updates. Antonio Kerrigan in Les Deux Buttes for us