Young people who took part in the weekend’s looting in France have posted videos on TikTok and X boasting about the goods they took and about beating the riot police.
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“Thank you Paris, thank you Paname,” a young man says in one video on TikTok, using a slang name for the capital. “You’re killers, guys, we tore it all up.”
His eyes are red, apparently from tear gas, and he goes on to list his haul. “I grabbed some new Under Armour,” he says, referring to the American sportswear brand.
He then turns to the CRS riot police. “You ran like that, guys, we wiped you out,” he says, before signing off: “Generation Z, respect.”
‘You save money by looting’
In a second video, a young man explains to an interviewer why he joined in. He says he was protesting about fuel prices because his mother has a car, and that he took clothes and goods from a sports shop.
“In the end, you save money by looting,” he says.
Asked for his view of France, he says: “I think France is racist, and we should all be equal.” He says a restaurant turned him away earlier that day but let in “a French person”.
The interviewer asks whether looting will only reinforce the image of “the North African who steals”. He replies: “If we carry on like this, it’s going to be chaos.”
‘You couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye’
The bravado contrasts sharply with the mood in government. On Monday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police had lost control.
“On Saturday, in some major cities, you couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and tell them we hadn’t lost control,” he said.
Nuñez acknowledged a “lack of anticipation” in the deployment of security forces. He said around 60,000 police and gendarmes were on duty nationwide on Saturday, too few to handle the large crowds of rioters and looters on the fringes of the demonstrations.
“Given the damage that has been caused, it was only right that I should hand in my resignation,” he said. President Emmanuel Macron refused to accept it
Damage in the ‘hundreds of millions’
Around half a million people marched across France on Saturday against the cost of living. The protests then turned into some of the worst violence the country has seen in years, with town halls and shops looted and set on fire.
In Paris, crowds of masked men in black hoodies yanked at metal shutters until they gave way. They cleared shelves of cigarettes, sunglasses, clothes, jewellery and food, AFP journalists reported. Looters left a supermarket with bags stuffed with cakes, fruit juice and alcohol.
Antique clocks disappeared from a small jewellery shop, and whole display racks of sunglasses vanished. Inside some shops, looters smashed cash registers onto the floor, only to find them empty.
More than 2,000 shops are expected to have been affected nationwide, according to Alain Di Crescenzo, president of the chamber of commerce. He put the damage at “hundreds of millions of euros”.
More than 2,500 people were arrested, and almost 1,000 members of the security forces were injured. Protesters were hurt too, among them a demonstrator whose hand was blown off by a police crowd-control grenade.
Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said more than 2,330 people had been taken into police custody over the weekend, 70% of them adults.
