Gilets jaunes mark anniversary of first protest

Gilets jaunes held a second consecutive day of demonstrations in Paris on Sunday to mark a year since the protest movement was founded.

A day after black-clad youths engaged in battles with the police and rampaged around one of the city’s main squares on the 53rd Saturday of yellow vest action, protesters gathered across France to mark the anniversary.

In Paris, several dozen yellow vests occupied part of the chic department store Galeries Lafayette to protest against what they called a “temple of consumerism”. After they were removed from the building by police they staged a peaceful sit-in protest on the pavement outside, where several were arrested. The store was evacuated and closed.

In Pont-de-Beauvoisin, near Chambéry in the Savoie region, gilets jaunes gathered for a minute’s silence to pay tribute to Chantal Mazet, who died on the first day of demonstrations in November last year after being run over at a roundabout being blocked by protesters.

The interior ministry said 28,000 people took part in protests across France on Saturday, 4,700 of them in Paris. The gilets jaunes claimed 44,000 took part.

The public prosecutor’s office said 173 people were arrested and 155 were kept in custody, including eight minors, after the clashes in Paris.

Masked casseurs (hooligans) ran riot in Place d’Italie on Saturday, wrecking public monuments including a war memorial, smashing shop and business windows and torching vehicles.

The city’s police chief, Didier Lallement, cancelled an official gilets jaunes march and ordered riot police and gendarmes to encircle the area to prevent the violence from spreading. Officers used teargas and water cannon during a four-hour standoff before clearing the square.

On Sunday police said they were examining CCTV footage to identify those responsible for the damage.

A government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, told Radio J that the gilets jaunes movement had been “infected by ultras … people who consider that political violence is legitimate. We cannot accept that.”

Twenty-nine metro stations and five suburban railway stations in Paris remained closed for most of Sunday.

The gilets jaunes movement began in the autumn of 2018 in protest at fuel tax rises and quickly spread to encompass wider grievances with the president, Emmanuel Macron, and his government.

At its height, around 280,000 protesters would gather for demonstrations across the country. Many were peaceful but there were outbreaks of violence in cities where the protests were reportedly hijacked by extreme elements.

Among the protesters who gathered in Paris on Sunday were Priscillia Ludosky, one of the founders of the movement, and Jérôme Rodrigues, one of its most high-profile members. Rodrigues lost the use of his right eye because of a police grenade or rubber bullet during the 11th weekend of protests in Paris at the end of January.

The pair joined a gathering of around 400 supporters near Les Halles in central Paris.

Police said they had made another 20 arrests by the early afternoon on Sunday. Outside the capital, gilets jaunes protests passed off mostly peacefully.