24 Nov 2018; AFP: Anti-government protesters clashed with French police on the Champs-Elysees in Paris on Saturday, leaving the area cloaked in tear gas and smoke from fires on a fresh day of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron.
Demonstrators wearing the yellow, high-visibility vests that symbolise their movement threw projectiles at police preventing them from moving along the famed shopping avenue, which was decked out in twinkling Christmas lights.
They also built barricades in some spots, and tore down traffic lights and street signs, creating riotous street scenes reminiscent of France's 1968 civil unrest, or popular insurrections in the mid-19th century immortalised in paintings and movies.
A hundred and thirty people were arrested, 42 of those in Paris, and 19 people were injured, including four police officers, the city police department and Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said.
Elsewhere, protesters took over highway toll booths to let traffic pass for free, or held go-slow vehicle processions, underlining one of their core complaints of escalating taxes on car fuel, especially diesel.
Macron, targeted by protesters' calls that he resign, took to Twitter to thank police for their actions against the demonstrations. "Shame" on those who assaulted or intimidated citizens, journalists and politicians, he said. "There is no place for violence in the (French) Republic."
- Smaller than a week ago -
The scale of the violence was much less than a week ago, when the "yellow vest" movement staged its first nationwide protest.
"We're not here to beat up cops. We came because we want the government to hear us, to hear the people," said one protest spokeswoman, Laetitia Dewalle, 37, adding that the largely leaderless, spontaneous movement denounced "violence by pseudo-protesters" on the fringes.
"We have just demonstrated peacefully, and we were teargassed," said Christophe, 49, who travelled from the Isere region in eastern France with his wife to protest in the capital. "We see how we are welcomed in Paris."
The interior ministry counted 106,000 protestors across France on Saturday, with 8,000 in Paris, of whom around 5,000 were on the Champs-Elysees.
That was far less than the national tally of 282,000 in the initial November 17 protests.
The French government cast blame for the unruly protests on the extreme right and "seditionists" it claimed were egged on by far-right politician Marine Le Pen.
But Le Pen rejected that. And opposition parties on both the right and the left hit back that the government was trying to reduce the protests to just the sporadic scenes of violence, and turning a deaf ear to the demonstrators' grievances.
Although Castaner seized on the "marked weakening" of the protest movement compared with a week earlier, the enduring anger of the repeat demonstrations carried the risk of snowballing into a major stand-off between the government and opponents of Macron's pro-business agenda.
- Rural frustrations -
A week ago, two people died and over 750 people, including 136 police officers, were injured in sometimes violent demonstrations that have shone a light on frustrations in many rural areas and small towns of France.
The "yellow vests" hail overwhelmingly from non-urban areas of France. They are strident about feeling overlooked and penalised by policies they see as being pushed through by elitist politicians in Paris.
Former investment banker Macron was elected on a pledge to put more money in workers' pockets. But the effects of his pro-business reforms on unemployment and purchasing power have been limited so far.
Many of the often low-income "yellow vest" protesters are particularly incensed at his decision to hike anti-pollution taxes on diesel, while scrapping a wealth tax on the rich.
"I'm not just fighting against the price of fuel. It's about tax, what we pay," protester Catherine Marguier told AFP at a pay booth on the A81 motorway near the village of La Gravelle in northwest France.
"People can't handle it any more. We need to change the government, the people at the top," she said.
Revolts against taxes have been a feature of French public life for centuries. Citizens still pay some of the highest in Europe as a percentage of GDP, and fuel-price protests are a common modern occurrence.
Previous rounds pitting the government against drivers took place in 1995, 2000, 2004, and 2008, often when tax increases coincided with high oil prices -- as they have this year.
- 'Gap between rich and poor' -
For political analyst Jean-Yves Camus, the French tend to rise up against taxes in particular when they feel the country's revered public services are failing them.
"The acceptance of taxes is based on the notion of redistribution," he said. "It declines when public services recede, the safety nets dwindle, and the gap between rich and poor increases."
A poll by the Odoxa research group for Le Figaro newspaper this week found that 77 percent of respondents described it as "justified".
