Curfews in France will be extended until Tuesday night “when the situation requires it,” the country’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Tuesday, after the measures “helped maintain nocturnal calm” overnight on Monday, following days of rioting and looting. Restrictions on nighttime traffic in parts of cities including Paris, Marseille and Lille reflected how the French state is trying to reassert its authority after the country’s biggest unrest in years. In the unrest that began Saturday, several government buildings were attacked and more than 3,000 stores were looted, leading to the arrest of more than 2,500 people, officials said. French courts are struggling to process the high number of cases linked to those arrests, amid calls from politicians for a strong and swift judicial response. Courts in Paris and Marseille are holding additional trials with accelerated procedures. They typically involve court-appointed prosecutors and attorneys looking at simple cases in which the defendant is caught in the act. Some people have already been sentenced, while more than 700 people were expected to be tried in the coming days, Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of Justice, said in an interview broadcast Tuesday morning. Darmanin said that among those arrested there were “people of immigrant origin, people who are foreigners, but there are also people who are completely integrated and who are French.” He did not give further details about their nationalities, but added that 95 percent of those arrested were men and 70 percent were adults. “There are many convictions that result in prison sentences with immediate incarceration,” Darmanin said. “In Limoges, 10 protesters attacked police officers. All 10 are in prison.” A person accused of setting fire to the town hall in Limoges, a small city in central France, was arrested with the help of an elite police unit, prosecutors said Tuesday. The devastating fire, in a sleepy town known for porcelain, sparked national outrage. Darmanin said in a separate interview on Monday night that he had asked French prosecutors for a firm response to the widespread violence. “The justice system is independent,” he said, “but it administers justice on behalf of the French people, and the French people demand maximum firmness.” Curfews vary from city to city, and the government instructs local officials to take appropriate measures depending on the situation in their jurisdictions. In Paris, the curfew was imposed in some parts of the city only on Monday night and was combined with a ban on unauthorized public gatherings in some neighborhoods. Authorities in other areas, such as Nice, in the south of France, have announced that their curfews will remain in place until Sunday. Some politicians criticized the government’s response, some saying it was too limited and others saying it was too harsh. “A curfew cannot be a political response to a social crisis,” Green Party leader Marine Tondelier said on social media on Monday. “A citywide curfew affects residents who have not participated in any violence: night shift workers, students, families and people who must travel for essential reasons.” Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly, the lower house of France’s Parliament, said she wishes the curfews had been imposed sooner. “We were shocked on Saturday, but I was even more shocked on Sunday night, thinking, ‘But wait, we still haven’t learned the lessons of what happened, we still can’t stop the looting,’” he said in a radio interview Tuesday. He called for a parliamentary inquiry into both the violence and the government’s strategy to prevent it.
