Police and protesters have clashed in Paris after rioters set fire to a restaurant in central Paris and disrupted traffic amid anti-government demonstrations.
Nearly 200 people have been arrested after huge crowds took to the city’s streets in a day of planned nationwide protests by the “Block Everything” (Bloquons Tout) group over widespread frustration with France’s political class and proposed budget cuts.
Footage shows flames burning inside the Wafu Bar restaurant near the Rue de Rivoli as the fire took hold on Wednesday afternoon.
On Monday, the country’s parliament ousted prime minister Francois Bayrou in a confidence vote over his plans to tame the country’s ballooning debt. This led the president, Emmanuel Macron, to appoint his fifth prime minister in less than two years, choosing a close ally, Sebastien Lecornu, which outraged left-wing politicians.
Firefighters and police were deployed, using teargas to tackle chaos on the capital’s streets, with protests and traffic disruption also reported on highways throughout the country, including in Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes and Lyon. At least 300 people have been arrested across France.
The protests are being organised by the “Block Everything” movement – a group with no centralised leadership that sprang up online in May among right-wing organisations, researchers and officials said, but has since been taken over by the left and the far left.
They have been compared to the 2018 “Yellow Vest” protests, which initially arose over fuel price hikes but morphed into a broader movement against Mr Macron and his plans for economic reform.
The demonstrations are taking place across France. Mr Retailleau told reporters that around 50 hooded people tried to start a blockade in Bordeaux, while in Toulouse, in the southwest of the country, a fire disrupted train traffic early on Wednesday, though it was quickly extinguished.
He said 80,000 security forces had been deployed, including 6,000 in Paris. French media had reported that 100,000 people were expected to take part in the demonstrations.
“Anger has been rumbling for months, even years,” said Daniel Bretones, a union member protesting in Marseille. “We’re on the fifth prime minister under Macron’s second term, and it has never changed anything.”
French politics have been in disarray since Macron called snap elections last year that produced a deeply fragmented legislature. Far-right and left-wing lawmakers hold over 320 seats at the National Assembly, while the centrists and allied conservatives hold 210.
New Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu took to office amid the chaos, pledging to find creative ways to work with rivals to pass a debt-slimming budget while also promising new policy directions. He is known as a loyalist who is unlikely to rip up Macron’s pro-business economic agenda, and has has pledged to consult with all political forces and trade unions before forming his Cabinet.
His first challenge will be how to steer a streamlined 2026 budget through parliament, which is split into three distinct ideological blocs. Parties broadly agree on the need to slash France's deficit, which reached 5.8% of GDP in 2024, but not on how to do it.
The new PM must send a draft of the budget to parliament by 7 October, and it will have until 13 October to pass before the year’s end.
While the hard-left said it would seek to topple Lecornu with an immediate no-confidence motion, the far-right National Rally (RN) signalled tentative willingness to work with him on the budget - as long as its budgetary demands are met.
"His budget will be RN or his government will not be," RN lawmaker Laure Lavalette posted on X late on Tuesday.
The unrest also comes after the discovery of a number of severed pigs’ heads – five of which had Mr Macron’s name written on them – close to mosques in the Paris area on Tuesday. It is thought that the incident may bear the hallmarks of previous suspected Russian-linked acts of attempted destabilisation that have targeted France and other allies of Ukraine.
Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said that although investigations are still underway, “we cannot help but draw links with previous acts that happened, often at night, and which later proved to be acts of foreign interference”.
He said the placement of pigs’ heads in the vicinity of nine mosques – four in Paris and five others in its suburbs – appeared to have been “carried out simultaneously, necessarily by several people”.
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