France sent its elite CRS 8 unit — a police force built specifically for urban violence — into central Paris for a second straight day on Sunday, as looting and arson flared again following a night of nationwide rioting that produced more than 2,000 arrests and left over 600 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters injured, according to Breitbart News.
Paris police said the unit was dispatched to the Place de la RĂ©publique, where several hundred rioters were seen clashing with officers on Sunday afternoon, Le Parisien reported. The deployment marked the second consecutive day the specialist squad had been called into the capital.
Looting in the Heart of Paris
Le Figaro reported that men wearing balaclavas — some of whom spoke Arabic — looted the women’s clothing store Petite Mendigote on Rue Beaurepaire. The street had already been hit the previous night, when the Franprix supermarket was ransacked on Saturday evening.
Saturday’s unrest spread well beyond the capital. Rioters set fires at Limoges City Hall and the Lyon tourism office, both of which suffered heavy damage, according to the outlet. The broader toll on businesses was estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros in damage and lost revenue, on top of destruction to public property.
The Macron government has drawn sharp criticism for failing to head off Saturday’s destruction, which followed nationwide demonstrations against the “high cost of living,” per the AFP photographs and reporting cited by Breitbart. Sunday’s clashes at Place de la RĂ©publique came after an unauthorized demonstration, and images showed protesters breaking apart the fountain at the base of the Statue de la RĂ©publique to gather stones.
Police Union Blames ‘Institutional Failures’
The police union UnitĂ© issued a statement Sunday arguing that officers were absorbing the cost of political failure. “Police officers are paying the price for public impotence,” the union said, describing the riots as no surprise but the product of “accumulated institutional failures that our fellow citizens suffer daily and for which police officers, on the front lines, are paying with their lives.”
The union called for resources, a legal framework that protects those maintaining order, and a justice system that “truly punishes the perpetrators of violence.”
Le Pen: Government ‘Exhausted, Disoriented’
National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen weighed in with a video released two hours before President Emmanuel Macron’s planned national address. She described the government as “on its last legs, exhausted, disoriented” and said it “seems incapable of doing anything other than commenting on its own impotence.”
Le Pen framed the unrest as a deeper crisis. “We are experiencing a profound crisis of confidence and authority that threatens democracy. This situation should alarm us: our country is caught in a vice, even held hostage, between violence and impotence,” she said.
Blame Spreads Across the Political Spectrum
The government has sought to pin most of the responsibility on Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise party, which police have accused of manipulating the riots over the past month. Others, however, traced the unrest to decades of mass migration policies, including those of the outgoing Macron administration.
French MEP Marion MarĂ©chal was blunt: “We are facing a scumbag-leftist insurrection. The alliance between the far-left and the predominantly immigrant suburbs. It only takes eyes to see and ears to hear: we are living through ethnic riots.”
The scenes drew attention from across the Atlantic as well. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said the riots resulted from Western liberals having “imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion,” and warned Americans that what was happening in France represented the “future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”
With a second day of clashes in the capital and a presidential address pending, the political pressure on Macron’s government shows no sign of easing — from the streets, from the police rank and file, or from the opposition lining up to exploit the moment.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/10/18/specialist-urban-violence-police-squad-deployed-to-paris-as-riots-and-looting-continue/