France is on high alert ahead of a new day of nationwide protests on Saturday, a week after the country saw some of its worst unrest in decades.
Sweeping restrictions have been imposed on demonstrations across France but hundreds of thousands of protesters are still expected to gather in Paris and elsewhere for a second round of protests organised by students, trade unions and wider anti-government groups.
The interior ministry has said it will deploy 70,000 police officers, ramping up the security presence in French cities, after the government was accused by opposition parties of failing to foresee the scale of the unrest on 17 October.
“We will not let anything go unchallenged,” said Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.
“We will be uncompromising with the vandals, with the looters, and all those who commit acts of violence,” he added, explaining that separate from the planned protests, numerous calls for violence had been seen on social media from the “far left and radical extreme left”.
Hundreds of people have been jailed for vandalism, arson and looting after fast-track court hearings in recent days.
Disillusionment is high among the French public, who have seen cost-of-living pressures increase and who are faced with increasingly dire warnings that any future government will likely come with deep spending cuts.
The protests began with demands from high school students to improve school conditions and fix staff shortages, before violence took hold in places.
President Emmanuel Macron met high-school students’ representatives on Friday ahead of Saturday’s protests, and although they said he had made clear commitments to them, they said students should “continue to mobilise”.
Macron told them his government would make a series of commitments to improve high school education from Monday, his advisers told French TV.
