Hooded youths armed with flares are mingling with crowds of so-called “protestors” in Paris, blockading schools with burning rubbish bins and assorted debris.
Reports indicate that over a dozen schools have been shut down, with a school district spokesman admitting “extra security measures” have been taken at sixteen. Twelve more are “otherwise disrupted”.
The police have reported a number of arrests after officers were bombarded with rocks and other projectiles.
Crowds have also marched on the Place de la Nation in eastern Paris carrying banners reading “Vengeance for Theo”, a reference to a man who was allegedly assaulted by police officers earlier in February 2017.
Tensions were high, with a helicopter overhead and tear gas deployed against aggressive groups of protestors.
The French capital has been wracked with violence for over two weeks, with civil unrest spreading from suburbs dominated by migrant and migrant-descended communities to the city centre.
Shock footage has emerged in recent days showing the police occasionally in full retreat, with squad cars racing down streets backwards before rampaging mobs.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist Front National and frontrunner in France’s upcoming presidential elections, has lambasted the incumbent government for its “paralysis” in the face of increasing disorder and lawlessness.
“The forces of order are targeted by bands of scoundrels,” she said. “The government is silent. A silence that reflects both its cowardice and its impotence.”
Hugues Moutouh, a former special advisor to France’s interior ministry, has accused elements within the political class of becoming “accomplices” to the violence by constantly seeking to justify it.
“Hopelessly smitten with idealism and naivety on the topic of security, the rancid Left sees every suburban youth who’s known to the police and has a foreign background as a victim of the system,” he wrote. “Socialists do not yet speak of [the riots] as an act of ‘resistance’, but they are not far off.”