Yellow vests, black Saturday in Paris

Saturday, December 1, 10:30, Act III of the mobilization of yellow vests on the Champs Elysees.

Demonstration declared to the authorities, filter dams with search and identity check to access the Avenue.
500 people came who did not commit any degradation on this avenue.

But soon, the adjacent lanes are invaded by protesters among whom slip thugs who, over the course of the afternoon, will transform the surrounding areas and other parts of the capital into a battlefield.

Avenue Kléber is particularly affected. Fires are lit, cars burned, shop windows, banks and restaurants broken, looting ensues.
The Place de l’Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe are not spared. Fires, tags on the monument, some sculptures are broken and the museum devastated with an attempt to extinguish the Flame.

Franklin Roosevelt Avenue, Avenue de la Grande Armee, Avenue de Friedland, Trocadero suffer the same violence.
The abuses then extend, Place de Clichy, Les Halles, Gare St Lazare where police on horseback intervene, Bastille …

An anecdote, Place St Augustin, the thugs save a beautiful white collectible DS, intact in the middle of the rubble, the carcasses of burned cars and charred motorcycles.

More fires, barricades, made of street furniture ripped and palisades ransacked, cars looted or burned, vandalized fire hydrants, a flammable tracto-shovel.

The alarms of the vehicles resound, the smoke of the tear gas clouds the streets, we hear the explosions of the grenades, firefighters must be protected by the police to extinguish the fires that even affect some buildings.

Local residents panic. Reporters are starting to talk about hallucinating and frightening situation.
They see people around them with axes, hammers, crowbars, shears. they notice metal poles cut at the grinder, holes in the pavement whose cobblestones have been torn off to serve as projectiles, bolts …

These degradations are the result of small groups very mobile and organized, helmeted, masked, very difficult to apprehend by the police. You have to know that a policeman has on him 20kg of material and to run after young people, it is for him mission impossible.

Who are these thugs? Blackblocks, anarchists, far-right, far-left, thugs, looters from « neighborhoods », activists from abroad?
As early as the morning the Rue de Rivoli had been invaded by the crowd of demonstrators and fires, lit.

The tension mounted when a fire was lit in the Tuileries Garden then, when a heavy grid was loosened and felled. It was at this moment that there was a serious wounded person whose vital prognosis was engaged.
At 21h, during his speech on television, Christophe Castaner gave the figures of 110 wounded, including 20 among the police and 187 fires in the capital, including 6 buildings.

He spoke of seditious, factious, thuggish, who mingled with peaceful yellow vests, making it difficult for the police. He mentioned « ruthless breakers » who even intended to kill police officers.
Scenes of chaos, urban guerrilla warfare, almost insurectional situation, strong words are pronounced.
More than 4500 CRS and mobile gendarmes were mobilized.

Linda Kebbab, National Delegate Unit SGP Police FO, highlighted police anger, similar to that of yellow vests, evoking the hierarchical pressure, fatigue of exhausted troops, poor social coverage, judicial laxity, the inflexibility of the government that put all the burden on the police.

« The police are not able to solve a political crisis … we can not continue like this … unless we call on the Army … » she said.

At 19:48, President Macron spoke from Argentina where he participated in the G20.
After lengthy statements on the success of the meeting on trade and climate, on the partnership with China, on multilateralism and the defense of the common interests of Europe, on the next deadlines, G24 in Poland and G7 to Biarritz in August 2019 in Biarritz … Emmanuel Macron said:
« What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the expression of a legitimate anger … the Arc de Triomphe has been defiled … nothing justifies that police are attacked, looted shops, passers-by and assaulted journalists … these people want chaos, not change … I respect challenges, I hear oppositions … but I will never accept violence.  »

In Paris, the damage is huge but the anger of the yellow vests is too.

Jean-François Barnaba, yellow jacket of the Indre spoke on Bfm Tv: « I do not condone the violence but I understand them, such exasperation inevitably entails these excesses. »

Is there a risk of radicalization of yellow vests that would take the cause of the situation of chaos?
What answers will be made by the government to the claims of the yellow vests to avoid a new black Saturday?

In particular to 4 main demands: massive reduction of taxes, increase of wages and pensions, restoration of public services, democratization of insufficiently representative institutions.

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