With riots and looting continuing on Monday, France announced a new curfew in Paris and other cities.

The French government ordered Monday night curfews for parts of several cities, including Paris, Nice and Lille, as it tried to reassure citizens after the worst riots in decades erupted across the country.

The curfews were the clearest signs that the government was trying to reassert control in the face of fierce criticism that it had been woefully unprepared to deal with widespread violence and looting that broke out this weekend on the sidelines of large, organized protests.

France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered a mea culpa on national radio on Monday, saying that the police had not been ready for the scale of the riots that spun off from the mostly peaceful protests held across the country. Mr. Nuñez said he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron but that it had not been accepted.

The people on the front lines of this are the police, but just behind them are shopkeepers in France who've seen their businesses wiped out by looters.

A store owner at a gold-buying shop whose front window had been smashed told me she was forced to close up early on Saturday.

"I got a call. It was my neighbor, who was working next door at the restaurant. He'd made a video showing a group of young people," she said, adding that they forced the door open and "smashed everything up."

"They stole things," she said. "When I got back, they'd taken everything."

Later, I stopped outside a ransacked Nicolas wine store, one of the country's most prominent wine retail brands. The storefront was agape, the entrance and both display windows smashed, revealing shelves picked clean. Empty Champagne boxes and glass littered the floor.

Among the other businesses targeted by looters and damaged in the violence across Paris on Saturday were major supermarket chains, tech stores, bars, and vape shops.

Needless to say, champagne and vaping have absolutely nothing to do with the stated reasons for the protests. These people aren't trying to say something, they're just trying to steal something.

Various news outlets have done reports featuring shop owners who've been hit. Here's one from Euronews. This owner describes organized groups of people who came in waves to loot her store. "They targeted our shops armed with metal poles taken from nearby scaffolding, smashed everything and then looted whatever they could," she said.

The owner of a bike shop was interviewed by CNN. Looters took everything in her store.

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The CNN story above mentioned an incident in Nice which has gotten a lot of attention. The owner of a gaming shop tried to block the entrance to his business but was attacked when he turned his back.

His name is Pierre and he's becoming a bit of an icon for trying to stand up to these creeps.

Pierre, who works at a Micromania store, told French TV network BFM that he put himself "in front and hoped that people wouldn't try to come in too aggressively."

Locals came to support him, and the mayor of Nice Eric Ciotti also visited him on Sunday, as others scour through videos to help police identify the attackers.

Pierre has turned not just into a symbol of courage in France, but he has also become an icon for gamers. An image of him standing defiantly in the shop entrance next to a poster of Goku, a character from the Dragon Ball manga series, has quickly transformed him into a superhero around the world, with some branding him the "French Goku."

It takes courage to stand up to the mob. Good for Pierre. Hopefully others will follow his example.

Finally, there's this poor woman also trying to stop people from looting. She seems sympathetic to "the cause" but points out that looting shouldn't have anything to do with it.


There are decent people in France trying to stand up to these looters. At some point they could use a lot more help from the police. Earlier today I posted this video of an armed man taking on the mob in Milan, Italy.

Bonus clip: From back in 2020, this is how you stop people looting your store during a riot.