At least 96 people were arrested in various altercations during the night of the French national holiday, between Friday and Saturday, which in any case had much fewer incidents than last year, as shown by the 255 vehicles set on fire, 40% less .
The French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, wanted to underline this Saturday morning with the still provisional figures on his Twitter account that “significant drop” in material damage, and attributed it “to our law enforcement, their presence and the numerous preventive checks carried out”.
July 14 is usually a troubled day. Last year, between July 13 and 14, there were 800 arrests, more than 700 vehicles were burned and there were riots in Paris, Marseille, Nantes, Lyon and Dijon. “This year the July 14 party comes in a particular context, after the extreme violence that we experienced last week,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said at a press conference to present the device.
Faced with the risk that a new outbreak could occur such as that of the riots that lasted for a week starting on the 27th after the death of a young man in the city of Nanterre by a police shot when he was trying to skip a checkpoint, Darmanin he had decided on a massive deployment of agents for the national holiday of July 14.
In total, 45,000 police officers and gendarmes took to the streets both the night before and after that July 14, in which 7 of them were injured, when on the same date in 2022 there had been 21.
There were 51 episodes in which fireworks were used against law enforcement, compared to 333 a year earlier.
Since June 27 and the start of the riots in sensitive neighborhoods of many French cities, the Police had requisitioned some 165,000 mortars, the most feared fireworks in those attacks.
The festivities on July 14 traditionally end with fireworks. The most popular are those of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which tens of thousands of people in the surrounding area witnessed on the street. In the capital and its immediate periphery, 10,000 police and gendarmes had been mobilized.
