PARIS — Business is up tenfold at a weapons store near Place de l’Opéra in Paris: Shopkeepers from all over the city have been stocking up on pepper spray and tear gas.
In the nine days since riots erupted in cities across France, thousands of merchants have also boarded up their storefronts, radically altering the Paris streetscape. The screech of electric saws and pounding of nails into plywood are now background noise in the French capital.
“They’re afraid their stores will be attacked and looted,” Yves Gollety, owner of the weapons store, explained.
Adding to the dark mood are police helicopters hovering, with searchlights blazing, to enforce a late-night curfew in the Les Halles and République sections of Paris.
And the city has removed many of the huge street-corner bins where Parisians are accustomed to dropping their empty wine and beer bottles. Rioters had been knocking them over to get glass ammunition against police.
Yet daily life has barely changed in much of Paris, where it can seem like normal times amid the chaos. Friends chat in cafés with shattered windows. Customers ignore plywood covering the front doors of shops.
But the social and economic grievances that boiled over so violently have not gone away, and nobody can escape the dreaded question: What’s next?
Protesters shield themselves from a water cannon during a demonstration in Paris on Oct. 24.
(Manu Brabo / Getty Images)
More demonstrations, for sure, and a strike planned for Nov. 5, which has left many resigned to toggling, for now, between upheaval and ordinary life.
The contrasts can be jarring.
At Cycles Laurent, a bike store on Boulevard Voltaire, a makeshift wooden window doubles as a spray-painted sign urging people to come on in.
“We remain open,” it says.
The bike shop is one of more than 3,000 businesses attacked or pillaged in France in the aftermath of giant protests against the government of President Emmanuel Macron the weekend of Oct. 17.
Although a tense urban peace has taken hold since then, many residents of Paris, Toulouse, Marseille and other cities beset by riots still feel under siege, much like Los Angeles after the 1992 riots.
“This whole climate is horrible,” said Yolande Montagnac, a retiree who has lived for 45 years near the Gare de Lyon in Paris and was heartbroken by the damage to the city.
Scattered curfews and a police surge to keep nationwide protests under control have helped to stop the looting. More than 400,000 protesters returned to the streets on Saturday, by the police count; closer to double that number, according to unions. Apart from a few tear-gas skirmishes, the demonstrations ended peacefully.
The unrest began after high school students took to the streets last month to denounce poor conditions and resources at their campuses. On Monday, Macron said the government would take “concrete measures” to address those concerns.
As the turmoil has grown, Paris has been the setting of odd contrasts.
A car is engulfed in flames during demonstrations on Oct. 17 in Paris.
(Carl Court / Getty Images)
As boulevard barricades were burning Oct. 17 in Les Halles, the lilting harmonies of a roving choir singing a peace ballad were soothing passersby shopping for cheese and wine a few blocks away.
Hours later, vandals smashed scores of windows around the corner and ransacked stores as neighbors watched in horror from apartments above. Unchecked by police, looters returned the next night.
Not a week had gone by before a gaggle of fashionistas, testing the limits of decency and humor, gathered on the same stretch of the Rue Étienne Marcel for a riot-porn glamour shot in a wrecked ad-poster frame.
In the distance was a bronze statue of Louis XIV on a rearing horse in the majestic Place des Victoires, its stone pedestal stained by protesters’ splashes of red paint.
On Place de la République, the scene of violent clashes between police and protesters on Oct. 17, the usual skateboarders were back on Sunday morning. By then, graffiti had been scrubbed from the central monument that pays tribute to the French Republic, including its tradition of insurrection.
At Gollety’s weapons store, Armurerie de la Bourse, dozens of guns are on display, but firearm restrictions are so tight in France that merchants were not trying to buy any.
“In France, nobody shoots a robber,” he said. “You go to prison.”
Arnaud, 24, a pastry chef who works at a bakery and declined to share his last name, bought tear gas Friday “to neutralize someone if need be.”
A police officer runs near a fire Oct. 17 in Paris. Thousands of officers were dispatched across France to maintain order.
(Carl Court / Getty Images)
“It’s incredible that it’s come to this,” he said as he left Gollety’s shop. “I think we’ve reached that limit where the French are saying, ‘OK, the state isn’t protecting me, I’m going to try to protect myself until the state protects me.’”
Arnaud supports France’s far right. “There’s no center anymore, no core that can bring everyone together. It’s a loss of bearings, and it’s a mess,” he said.
In the run-up to the protests on Saturday, the Paris police commissioner, Patrice Faure, heightened anxieties by advising merchants to hire security guards, saying police alone could not “guarantee the protection of every business.”
Florence Portelli, the mayor of Taverny, a Paris suburb, was mortified by the call for self-defense.
“The day we start opening the door to that, we end up with what sometimes happens in the United States, in countries where things go absolutely, completely crazy,” she told BFM television.
Since the protests started, they have expanded to cover the high cost of living, aggressive police tactics and other grievances. French police have arrested about 12,000 people.
At the Paris protest on Saturday, a row of police in riot gear led the crowd along the authorized route down boulevards on the city’s outskirts. Just behind them was a group of “black bloc” militants yelling ACAB, the international slogan for “all cops are bastards.”
The sea of 100,000 people marching behind them was a wide mix of union members, students, leftists and others unhappy with Macron.
Demonstrators march in Paris on Oct. 24. Authorities in French cities and towns have imposed curfews and other restrictions.
(Manu Brabo / Getty Images)
Chloé Brani, a 21-year-old student from the suburbs, carried a sign that summed it up: “We’re all fed up.”
She blamed inequalities in France on “elites who don’t care.”
If military and police money “were simply put back into the causes we’re asking for — a normal salary, normal living conditions for workers in every possible profession, and high schools in good condition — there actually wouldn’t be a problem,” she said as she marched. “It’s the distribution of wealth that’s unjust.”
Montagnac, a retired executive assistant, sees France’s political leadership in a state of collapse, most evident in its loss of control during the riots. But she also thinks the turmoil is rooted in the decline of human contact in the digital age.
“Everyone is on their phone all the time,” she lamented Sunday morning at the bustling Aligre outdoor produce market, where neighbors were, just like before the riots, buying fruit, vegetables, meat and fish. “There’s no more friendliness. People don’t take the time to stop and chat. It’s always a rush.”
For Montagnac, 69, it was especially painful to see the owner of a furniture store on Boulevard Diderot hauling his sofas and chairs into the back of the shop to deter looters.
“He can’t sleep at night, he’s so scared,” she said.
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