Police Arrest 980 as French Marches Turn to Street Fighting

French police arrested 980 people on Saturday after a day of nationwide marches against fuel prices and the cost of living ended in evening confrontations in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and other cities. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the arrest count would rise, adding that two demonstrators were reported seriously injured, one in Toulouse and the other in Clermont-Ferrand.

Authorities put turnout at 410,000, while unions counted roughly 800,000. Officials deployed about 70,000 officers and placed restrictions on movement in several cities, steps intended to keep the day from reaching the scale of the prior week's disorder, when hundreds of businesses were looted and buildings burned.

The trouble in Paris started after a march that ran from Porte d'Italie toward Porte de Vincennes. Protesters stacked barricades and threw objects at police, and officers with batons moved against masked youths breaking windows at a car dealership. Nuñez said several thousand radical activists had gathered behind the march, among them some 500 people his ministry identified as rioters. The Paris deployment included a unit assigned normally to organized crime and counter-terrorism work.

In Marseille, demonstrators burned rubbish bins and blocked streets with metal sheets. In Lyon, officers used tear gas against a crowd that assembled in an area the local prefecture had closed. A protester at that gathering said there were around 150 people present, mostly secondary school and university students, and that visibility in the street was near zero.

President Emmanuel Macron had issued a decree earlier in the week limiting demonstrations to those organized by recognized trade unions. Courts in recent days have jailed hundreds of people for vandalism, arson and looting through fast-track hearings. Saturday's arrests bring the total from the past week's proceedings past 2,500.

Protesters described hardship as their reason for marching. A 26-year-old in Paris who gave her name as Zelie told the BBC that people were "suffering a lot" and that "it's been too much." Two masked teenagers said their generation felt abandoned by the government, and one called looting "really not good" while blaming poverty and police violence for it. In Orléans, 13,000 people rallied peacefully against the National Rally party.

The unrest reached beyond France. Riot police in Tirana, Albania, fired tear gas at thousands of anti-government demonstrators, and clashes were reported in Brussels. In Milan, hundreds of soldiers and police stopped protesters from assembling after concerns about a repeat of the previous week's violence.

Last weekend's demonstrations drew about 550,000 people against rising fuel prices and living costs, following weeks of student protests. More than 2,500 arrests followed, over 2,000 shops and businesses were affected, and the Chambers of Commerce and Industry put damage in the hundreds of millions of euros. About 1,000 police officers were injured, and one demonstrator's hand was reportedly torn off by a crowd-control grenade. Presidential elections are six months away, and leading contenders have pointed to Macron and his ministers.