France seethes again as youth-led protests sweep Europe

Hundreds of thousands of people marched across France on Saturday to protest the rising cost of living, school conditions, and police violence. The French Interior Ministry reported that 320,000 people participated in the nationwide demonstrations, including 70,000 in Paris. While some participants wore Halloween costumes, tensions escalated in several cities.

In Paris, police fired tear gas and conducted over 1,200 checks at railway stations, while the police prefecture noted a "hard core of several hundred rioters" attacked officers with projectiles and a Molotov cocktail.

Clashes were reported in several other French cities, including Lyon, where police used tear gas, and Toulouse, where water cannons were used against an unauthorized protest of several thousand people. The Interior Ministry stated that radical elements attempted to enter city centres in Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille with the intent to loot and vandalize, with footage showing fires burning in the streets of Marseille.

In Germany, massive youth-led protests organized by the group "GenZ regelt!" took place in cities including Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Hamburg. While demonstrations were mostly peaceful, tensions rose in the evening. In Cologne, police used a water cannon to disperse a crowd that targeted officers with fireworks. Bild reported that in Hamburg, protesters set barricades ablaze and threw bottles and eggs, while police used pepper spray in some locations.

Brief written by urgent.news from NPR, Dawn, DW English (Top Stories), DW News, South China Morning Post — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.