France has experienced the first day of relative truce after six nights of strong riots and violence throughout the country that have already left 3,400 detainees, thousands of cars set on fire and hundreds of buildings and businesses attacked. If there were 1,300 detainees on Friday, on Sunday night it barely exceeded 150. The Government does not want to claim victory, but is confident that its plan (appeasement messages and police deployment) to deal with this wave of violence will work and return the calm the country
The fuse was lit almost a week ago, after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy, by the shot of a policeman in Nanterre, district of the Parisian periphery. The days that have followed this event have been a roller coaster: first the neighborhoods rebelled, in response to the death of the young man, and then the riots began in the rest of the country, including the centers of large cities.
Shops have been looted, cars, trams and buses set on fire. Violence has crossed red lines: One day a bank branch was set on fire in a building with people on the upper floors. On Sunday morning, several individuals rammed a burning car into the house of the mayor of L’Haÿ-Les-Roses, south of Paris. Inside, his wife and his two children were sleeping.
They are just a few examples. It is almost miraculous, as government sources recall, that in these days there have been no victims on either side: neither by the rioters, nor by the forces of order. “The most tragic thing would have been another drama during the interventions. This has not happened despite the extreme violence that we have seen,” these sources say.
President, Emmanuel Macron, the Government, the opposition parties, the soccer player Kylian Mbappé, the French team and the grandmother of the deceased young man have called for the violence to stop. “It is your mothers who go to the shops that you are destroying, we no longer have cars, we no longer have anything,” said Nahel’s grandmother on Sunday.