France: Protests continue while police fire tear gas at demonstrators

Talk more about that now with France 24's Matthew Mary Carachet, who joins me on set. Matthew-Mary, so how is the government trying to avoid or at least minimize the violence of last week? Well, last week has been seen by many different groups as kind of a disaster. And a lot of that is because police were not prepared for the amount of protesters and the amount of violence that was going to come. A lot of that because the route, I'm going to talk about Paris at first. The route in Paris was not agreed upon. normally in France when you're having a protest the protesters and the state will agree upon a different route that you can take so police can prepare but in Paris the protesters rejected all the plans set forth by the state so when you come across Saturday you just have protesters all across the city and you had so many protesters because you had high schoolers that were joined by the yellow vests that were joined by university students and that were joined by the looters and the rioters and police could not respond to to the tons and tons of numbers and police are also blaming far left groups and who wanted to clash with police and opportunistic gangs for taking advantage of these high amounts of numbers to wreak havoc across the city so this week Macron and the government have really tried to tamp down on the amount of protesters and where they can go and what they can do Macron decreed earlier this week that only demonstrations organized by recognized trade unions would be permitted to take place. This is because trade unions have specific units that are trained to limit violence. Nonetheless, in Paris, they denied Yellow Vest demonstrators, but as you can see in the Oise, demonstrators from the Yellow Vest are out in the streets. They also denied the main student union, but the student union says like, no, we're going to go out there anyways. And as you just saw, on the map, there used to be, until this morning, a route that was going to go between Bastille and Nation, that kind of goes through the semi-center of Paris, you know, where there's maybe a lot of tourists, where there's a lot of shops. And police decided this morning that no, they were going to change the route to a much shorter route between Vincennes and Porte d'Italie. Now this is really on the edge of the city. There's not a lot of businesses there. There's a lot of university buildings there's normally not a lot of foot traffic and it's only 1.5 kilometers so it's a really easy thing for police to manage apart from that the police have closed tons of metro stops there's 24 metro stops closed museums are closed as you said shops are boarded up sports events are rescheduled now this is not just happening in paris this is happening across the country where a lot of different cities are really trying to clamp down on protests. Online, some sites have listed more than 500 planned demonstrations across the country. And as you can see, there are a lot of cities that have put in place bans, either semi or partial bans for unauthorized demonstrations. And there's two cities, Marseille and Limoges, where last week the famous city hall was burned down. These had bans, but they have been overturned. And how are authorities going about buffing up the police presence? Well, last year, there were 660,000 police that were sent out to the streets. This year, they've increased that by, I mean, this week, they've increased that by 10,000. So now there's 70,000. And in addition to the normal security unions that you see with the bulletproof vests and the protection, You also have RAIDS, which are an elite police unit that's worked with hostage situations and neutralized terrorists. You have the Motorcycle Violent Crime Suppression Brigade, and this is kind of controversial. It's pairs of police on motorcycles that can go right into the middle of a demonstration and make arrests. And you have plainclothes surveillance specialists, canine units, and even police cadets that are just out of the university. All right, Matthew, Mary, thank you for that.