Rioting raged in cities around France for a fourth night despite massive police deployment – with cars and buildings set ablaze and stores looted as family and friends prepared to bury the 17-year-old whose killing by an officer sparked the unrest.
France’s Interior Ministry announced the new figure for arrests around the country, where 45,000 police officers fanned out in a so-far unsuccessful bid to quell violence.
Despite an appeal to parents by French president Emmanuel Macron to keep their children at home, street clashes between young protesters and police raged on.
About 2,500 fires were set and stores were ransacked, authorities said.
Rituals to bid farewell to the teenager, identified only as Nahel, who was killed in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, began on Saturday with a viewing of the open coffin by family and friends.
Later, the coffin was to be taken to a mosque for a ceremony, then to a Nanterre cemetery for burial.
As the number of arrests continued to mount, the French government suggested the violence was beginning to lessen thanks to tougher security measures.
Since the unrest began on Tuesday night, police have made a total of 2,400 arrests — more than half of those in the fourth night of violence.
Still, the damage was widespread, from Paris to Marseille and Lyon and even far away, in the French territories overseas, where a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet in French Guiana.
France’s national football team — including international star Kylian Mbappe, an idol to many young people in the disadvantaged neighbourhoods where the anger is rooted — pleaded for an end to the violence.
“Many of us are from working-class neighbourhoods, we too share this feeling of pain and sadness” over the killing of 17-year-old Nahel, the players said in a statement.
“Violence resolves nothing.
“There are other peaceful and constructive ways to express yourself.”
They said it is time for “mourning, dialogue and reconstruction” instead.
Mr Macron has postponed a state visit to Germany because of the unrest in his country, the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s office said.
It said he requested the postponement in a telephone conversation on Saturday and that Mr Steinmeier “regrets the cancelation and has the fullest understanding in view of the situation in our neighbouring country”.
The cancellation is a clear sign of the gravity of France’s unrest, given the importance of the French-German relationship.
This is the second time in a few months that unrest in France has hurt Mr Macron diplomatically, after the King cancelled his first foreign visit as UK monarch, initially planned for France, because of pension reform protests.
Nahel’s killing has stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects who struggle with poverty, unemployment and racial discrimination.
The subsequent rioting is the worst France has seen in years and puts new pressure on Mr Macron, who blamed social media for fuelling the violence.
Anger erupted in the Paris suburb after Nahel’s death there on Tuesday and quickly spread nationwide.
Early on Saturday, firefighters in Nanterre extinguished blazes set by protesters that left scorched remains of cars strewn across the streets.
In the neighbouring suburb of Colombes, protesters overturned bins and used them for makeshift barricades.
Looters during the evening broke into a gun shop and made off with weapons in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police said.
Officers in Marseille arrested nearly 90 people as groups of protesters lit cars on fire and broke shop windows to take what was inside.
Buildings and businesses were also vandalised in the eastern city of Lyon, where a third of the roughly 30 arrests made were for theft, police said.
Authorities reported fires in the streets after an unauthorised protest drew more than 1,000 people earlier on Friday evening.
In Friday’s night violence, 917 people were arrested nationwide, 500 buildings targeted, 2,000 vehicles burned and dozens of shops ransacked.
While the number of overnight arrests was the highest yet, there were fewer fires, cars burned and police stations attacked around France than the previous night, the Interior Ministry said.
Interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the violence was of “much less intensity”.
Hundreds of police and firefighters have been hurt, including 79 overnight, but authorities have not released injury tallies for protesters.
Nanterre mayor Patrick Jarry said France needs to “push for changes” in disadvantaged neighboyrhoods.
Despite repeated government appeals for calm and stiffer policing, Friday saw brazen daylight violence too.
An Apple store was looted in the eastern city of Strasbourg, where police fired tear gas, and the windows of a fast-food outlet were smashed in a Paris-area shopping centre, where officers repelled people trying to break into a shuttered shop, authorities said.
In the face of the escalating crisis that hundreds of arrests and massive police deployments have failed to quell, Mr Macron held off on declaring a state of emergency, an option that was used in similar circumstances in 2005.
Instead, his government ratcheted up its law enforcement response, with the mass deployment of police officers, including some who were called back from annual leave.
Mr Darmanin ordered a nationwide nighttime shutdown on Friday of all public buses and trams, which have been among rioters’ targets.
He also said he warned social networks not to allow themselves to be used as channels for calls to violence.
“They were very co-operative,” he said, adding that French authorities were providing the platforms with information in hopes of co-operation identifying people inciting violence.
“We will pursue every person who uses these social networks to commit violent acts,” he said.
Mr Macron, too, zeroed in on social media platforms that have relayed dramatic images of vandalism and cars and buildings being torched.
Singling out Snapchat and TikTok, he said they were being used to organise unrest and served as conduits for copycat violence.
The violence comes just over a year before Paris and other French cities are due to host 10,500 Olympians and millions of visitors for the summer Olympic Games.
Organisers said they are closely monitoring the situation as preparations for Paris 2024 continue.
The police officer accused of killing Nahel was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.
Preliminary charges mean investigating magistrates strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude the officer’s use of his weapon was not legally justified.
Nahel’s mother, identified as Mounia M, told France 5 television she was angry at the officer but not at the police in general.
“He saw a little Arab-looking kid; he wanted to take his life,” she said.
“A police officer cannot take his gun and fire at our children, take our children’s lives,” she said.
The family has roots in Algeria.
Race was a taboo topic for decades in France, which is officially committed to a doctrine of colourblind universalism.
In the wake of Nahel’s killing, French anti-racism activists renewed complaints about police behaviour.
Thirteen people who did not comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year.
This year, another three people, including Nahel, died under similar circumstances.
The deaths have prompted demands for more accountability in France, which also saw racial justice protests after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.
This week’s protests echoed the three weeks of rioting in 2005 that followed the deaths of 15-year-old Bouna Traore and 17-year-old Zyed Benna, who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois.
