Receive free France updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest France news every morning.
French president Emmanuel Macron called a crisis meeting of ministers on Thursday after a second night of unrest sparked by a fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old during a traffic stop.
About 150 people were arrested as clashes erupted across the country overnight, with 2,000 police officers deployed in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the incident occurred on Tuesday, and other cities.
Mayors from small towns and suburbs, including near Lille in northern France and Dijon in the east, reported incidents of people setting fire to government buildings.
“The past few hours have been marked by scenes of violence against police stations but also against schools, city halls and so ultimately against institutions and the republic, and these can absolutely not be justified,” Macron said as he opened the crisis meeting at the interior ministry in Paris.
He added that a planned march called for Thursday afternoon by the teenager’s grieving mother, who has appeared in several videos on social media since the shooting, should be a moment for reflection and calm.
The death of the 17-year-old named Naël, who was of North African origin and was driving without a licence when he sought to evade police at a traffic stop, has sparked anger in the ethnically diverse areas outside the French capital and elsewhere in France where it was seen as another example of police brutality.
A video filmed by an onlooker was posted on social media almost immediately after the incident and appeared to show a police officer shooting into the driver’s side window as the car speeds off, despite no sign of any immediate danger to the two officers.
One of the officers involved has been taken into police custody for questioning. Prosecutors will hold a press conference on Thursday to update on the case.
Lawyers for Naël’s family have said they will file a lawsuit against the two officers involved.
The government is on high alert because a similar incident in 2005 exploded into three weeks of protests. Two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, died while running away from the police in Clichy-sous-Bois, another low-income Parisian suburb.
The movement morphed into a broader critique of the longstanding problems of high unemployment and crime plaguing the low-income communities around Paris. Such areas are home to many immigrants and their descendants, who face discrimination in employment and housing despite being French citizens, according to government studies.
Politicians from across the political spectrum have seized upon the shooting of the teenage driver.
Leftwing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon repeated his frequent criticism of heavy-handed police tactics. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen slammed Macron for calling the death “inexcusable and inexplicable” before the investigation into the events was complete, while the head of her party, Jordan Bardella, defended the police who faced “a climate of violence”.
Thirteen people died in France last year after refusing to stop at police traffic controls, compared with seven in 2021, although the overall number of stops has also risen sharply, according to official police figures. Some died because police shot them and others because of accidents as they fled.
Read the full article here
