Hundreds detained after students riot in France
Police detained 300 people around France after nationwide student marches against a new labour law turned violent.
Street cleaners cleared away torched cars today and the government braced itself for more protests.
A quarter of a million people took to streets in 200 demonstrations around the country yesterday, in a test of strength between youth and the conservative government of 73-year-old President Jacques Chirac.
Most of the violence – and the arrests – was around the Sorbonne university in Paris, where police fired rubber pellets and tear gas at youths who pelted them with stones and set cars on fire.
Forty-six police and riot officers were injured, according to LCI television.
A total of 187 people were detained in Paris, city police chief Pierre Mutz said on RTL radio today, blaming the violence on fringe groups of radicals and anarchists – and a few petty criminals who broke into a jewellery shop in the melee.
Some 300 people were arrested nationwide, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said. The clashes died down by late yesterday, and no major overnight violence was reported.
“There was a demonstration that went smoothly and then there were a few delinquents who came to pick a fight,” Sarkozy said.
The next major test will come tomorrow, when unions and students plan to march together.
If the government faces down the escalating groundswell of protest, Chirac’s prime minister and supposed preferred successor, Dominique de Villepin, and his ideas for revitalising France will have scored a major victory heading into next year’s presidential race.
If not, Villepin’s presidential ambitions may be finished and the government’s reforms discredited.
The students’ anger focuses on a new form of job contract championed by Villepin that will allow employers to fire young workers within their first two years in a job without giving a reason.
The government says the flexibility will encourage companies to hire thousands of young people, bringing down unemployment rates that run at 23 per cent among young adults and around double that in some of the depressed suburbs that were shaken by weeks of riots last year.
The job contract was one of the government’s responses to that violence. But students fear it will erode France’s coveted labour protections and leave the young by the wayside.
Villepin said he was “open to dialogue, in the framework of the law, to improve the first job contract” – but showed no sign of withdrawing the measure.
Yesterday’s protests in Paris began peacefully, with students whistling, chanting and beating drums. Later, however, tension mounted and police and rioters waged a back-and-forth battle amid acrid clouds of tear gas outside the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.
Several hundred youths threw Molotov cocktails, paving stones, metal crowd-control barriers, and tables and chairs taken from nearby cafes. Many cars were overturned or torched.
