France Protest Updates: Hundreds of Thousands March Amid Heavy Security New York Times (Online) Josephine de La Bruyère Mark Landler Reporting from Paris Hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered across France on Saturday, marching through streets alongside large-scale security forces the authorities had deployed to prevent a repeat of last weekend, when demonstrations degenerated into arson, looting and other violence. The marches were largely peaceful until evening, when clashes popped up and the police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse some protesters in Marseille and in Paris. The authorities said some 110,000 people had gathered in Paris, even after organizers were forced to change the location of the demonstration at the last minute. In Marseille, where looters ravaged a commercial avenue last week, a protest march produced few confrontations with the police until it reached the arch where it was supposed to end. Then clashes broke out between some masked demonstrators who erected barricades and the police, who used tear gas on the crowd. In Orléans, south of Paris, a protest against France's main far-right party, the National Rally, which is holding its convention in the city, ended peacefully in the afternoon. The local authorities said 11,000 protesters had gathered, while organizers in the crowd said 26,000 had joined. There were major discrepancies in crowd estimates nationwide as well, with the Interior Ministry saying there were 410,000 protesters across the country, and the C.G.T., a labor union that organized today's marches, putting the figure at 800,000. As evening fell and some clashes broke out, it underscored the test France faces: whether it can get a grip on the outbreak of urban violence that has shocked the public and thrown the country's leaders on the defensive. What began as a student-led protest movement has mutated into something darker — a nationwide cycle of violence that raises basic questions about France's ability to preserve law and order. Last weekend, the police failed to control marauding bands as they shattered shop windows, looted merchandise, incinerated vehicles and besieged public buildings. But on Saturday, as many as 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, reinforced by elite military troops, armored vehicles, drones and helicopters, filled streets and the skies in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and other cities. Several cities, including Le Havre, Toulon and Nice, banned all demonstrations in their downtown areas. Here's what to know: Economic backdrop: Fears about France's ballooning government deficit pushed the yield on its 10-year bond to above 5 percent on Friday for the first time since 2002, raising the prospect of a full-blown financial crisis. The government was spared another blow on Friday when the ratings agency Moody's opted to maintain its rating on France's sovereign debt. It had been widely expected to downgrade the rating. Read more › Closures: Shops across Paris boarded up their windows. The Louvre and other cultural institutions announced they would close on Saturday, and the Art Basel fair ended on Friday, two days early. A Sunday soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique Lyonnais was postponed. Nationwide unrest: The protest movement began with a handful of student demonstrations at high schools in suburban Paris last month. It has since broadened spread. Read more › Student protesters: On Friday, President Emmanuel Macron invited representatives of the high school students to his office, the first time he has engaged with them since they began protesting the state of the education system last month. Political ramifications: Mr. Macron has accused left-wing agitators of hijacking the student movement in a bid to polarize the country before a presidential election in April. The unrest has been a boon for France's main far-right party, the National Rally, whose presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, leads in most polls. The right has condemned Mr. Macron's response as dilatory and has promised to restore order. Josephine de La Bruyère Reporting from Milan Young people demonstrated across Italy on Saturday amid a heavy police presence to prevent the looting and violence that occurred during protests last weekend. The demonstrations echoed student protests in France that have unleashed a nationwide groundswell of frustration there, sparking the country's worst rioting in decades. Italy's marches on Saturday were largely peaceful, though protesters clashed with the police in Turin, Padua, Bologna and Rome, where a small group of demonstrators stormed the Colosseum. The police arrested just nine people nationwide and reported 87 to prosecutors, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. In Milan, the site of last week's largest and most violent demonstrations, some 10,000 people hit the streets, the police estimated — five times as many as had marched the previous weekend. Throngs of young people chanted about their frustration with the high cost of living and Italy's political establishment. They held hand-drawn signs denouncing low wages, high rents, economic inequality and Italy's financial support of Israel, whose war in Gaza is deeply unpopular with Italians. Protesters said that the country's sluggish job market and a government they saw as more focused on military spending than on investing in young people had set their generation up to fail. “I look for work abroad every day of my life,” said Ilaria Carrozza, 27, a design engineer. “And that's not fair: This is my country, I want to stay here. But I can't live like this.” Manfredi Cacioppo, a 26-year-old sales assistant from Sicily, said he was demonstrating in solidarity with truckers and farmers in southern Italy, who had recently blockaded roads and ports to protest high fuel prices caused by the war in Iran. “It all comes from the same issue: money being spent on war,” he said. “That money would be better to invest in health, education, transport, the housing crisis and help for the workers.” Last weekend's demonstrations took Italy's northern cities by surprise. In Milan, groups of masked young people set fires, looted stores and lobbed projectiles at the police, causing an estimated $1.1 million in damage, according to a local business association. Fifty-one people, most of them minors, were arrested. Milan's left-wing mayor accused the national police of “having underestimated the moment” and posting too few officers to the scene. Italy's right-wing interior minister accused the mayor of pandering to the left. Giorgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister, called an emergency meeting on Monday and announced tougher penalties for violent protesters. A cabinet member, Matteo Salvini, said that the government would send 500 soldiers to Milan this weekend to “defend” the city against “criminals.” On Saturday, army vehicles and police vans dotted many of Milan's main squares, and numerous stores in the city's shopping district boarded up their windows. Throughout the city, plainclothes police officers stopped groups of young people to check their identification documents. For many protesters, the first challenge was figuring out where to go. A social media account that helped organize the protests was supposed to post a meeting place at 2:30 p.m. But shortly before then, the Milan police said they had detained the account's owner. The announcement never came. That left many demonstrators unmoored. In bars and online chat rooms, they argued over where, and whether, to show up. “We were lost and confused,” said Caterina Sironi, a 23-year-old university student. “We ran all over the whole city.” Ruggero Lorenzi, 19 and a high school student, crisscrossed Milan on three trains and a tram in search of a demonstration. “On Telegram, on Instagram, in metro stations, everyone was fighting over where to go,” he said. After several false starts — “ten people over here, ten people over there,” he said — he found about 500 protesters gathered near a subway stop in the city center. As Mr. Lorenzi's protest snaked through the city to the Politecnico di Milano, Milan's oldest university, its ranks swelled. Many protesters said they were eager to keep the demonstration peaceful, hoping their message would be heard. The police used tear gas and water cannons against protesters in other cities on Saturday, but not in Milan, where they reported that there had been no violence or damage. “We're trying to emulate the French protests,” said Joshua Flores, 21, who is unemployed. “I hope this protest continues in a positive way.” Ben Hubbard The police and youths are engaged in cat-and-mouse clashes on side streets in Marseille. When the police arrive, the rioters, many in gas masks, flee up side streets, where they light dumpsters on fire to try to prevent the police from pursuing them. Ségolène Le Stradic In Orléans, the National Rally convention that had prompted thousands to attend a counter demonstration ended its first day. The far-right party's president, Jordan Bardella, presented the newly elected members of the party's executive committee, including Marine Le Pen, who is running for president. Party leaders closed the first day by leading the attendees in singing the national anthen, “La Marseillaise.” On Sunday, Le Pen and Bardella are expected to deliver speeches to approximately 10,000 supporters to officially launch the presidential campaign. Le Pen has been leading in some early polls on the race. Catherine Porter The atmosphere has begun to get tense at the end of the Paris protest. Some protesters light fire crackers, and police are starting to use tear gas. A helicopter flies overhead. It is still drizzling and getting dark. Catherine Porter Tens of thousands have gathered in southeastern Paris, where protests were relocated after a court upheld a police restriction. Mark Landler There are major discrepancies in crowd estimates from the French government and union organizers. The Interior Ministry estimates there were 410,000 protesters nationwide and 110,000 in Paris. The C.G.T., a labor union that organized today's marches, estimates 800,000 protesters nationwide and 250,000 in Paris. Mark Landler The scene in Paris has grown more chaotic in the last hour as the police have tried to disperse protesters with tear gas and a water cannon truck. This follows a familiar pattern: A mostly peaceful march ends in clashes between protesters and the police. Mark Landler and Catherine Porter Reporting from Paris A locked-down Paris is a headache for locals. But it was a heartache on Saturday for first-time visitors from Louisiana, who traveled here for an N.F.L. football game between the New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers and found the Louvre museum closed and the Arc de Triomphe ringed by police vans. “Just about everything is closed,” said Terri Wallis, 65, a school principal and Saints fan from Baton Rouge, who was visiting with three generations of her family. “You know, we're not wealthy people. This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip to come and see the Mona Lisa. So, this is a little disappointing.” The French authorities deployed as many as 70,000 police officers and gendarmes to prevent a repeat of last weekend, when mass protests degenerated into arson, looting and other violence. Officials in Paris and other cities hard hit by the unrest enforced curfews and temporary restrictions on gatherings. In Paris, fears of another outbreak of violence prompted several cultural institutions, including the Louvre, Grand Palais, Orsay, Orangerie and Picasso museums, to close. Ms. Wallis and her family were kicking around in a food store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the city's grandest boulevard, where traffic was light and private security guards were posted at most businesses' entrances. All along the street, shops and boutiques were boarded up to protect them from looters. With major cultural sites closed, Paris felt less chaotic than battened-down on a slate-gray Saturday afternoon. At the Louvre, a chain stretched across the door at the museum's pyramid entrance. The Tuileries Gardens were also closed — because of high winds, a sign said. While Notre-Dame Cathedral was open, Ms. Wallis said the lines outside it were extremely long, as tourists flocked to one of their few remaining options. A midday bicycle ride through Paris revealed an eerily empty city. The Place de la Bastille, famous as the site of uprisings during the French Revolution and more recently the locus for student-led protests, had been ruled off-limits to demonstrators by the Paris authorities on Saturday. A police phalanx, backed by a water-cannon truck and officers on motorcycles, kept the square clear. The police warned over a loudspeaker that anyone who tried to organize an illegal protest would be fined 135 euros, about $150. “It's not possible to stay here regardless of why you are here,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. “I ask you to leave the square.” The authorities pushed the protesters to the southern periphery of the city, a last-minute change in the approved route for the march, which the organizers said was calculated to sow disarray in their ranks. Whether it would avert a repeat of the arson and looting that broke out across Paris last weekend was not yet clear. Ms. Wallis said she considered calling off the trip after seeing those riots. But the Saints-Steelers game, the first N.F.L. match ever played in Paris, will go ahead as scheduled on Sunday in the Stade de France, a stadium in the Paris suburbs a few miles from where the high school protest movement began last month. In those demonstrations, students erected barricades in front of their schools to protest dilapidated buildings, a shortage of teachers and a university admissions process that many say is opaque and unfair. Chelsea Bertrand, who was with the Wallis family and works at an elementary school in Baton Rouge, said that as an educator, she was impressed by how the French students had mobilized, even if it affected her visit. “You teach them to speak up for what's right,” she said. “The fact that they're actually standing up in a positive way — how it originally started — for their rights and what they think is best for education — I think that's amazing.” The women said they hadn't witnessed any unrest and weren't worried about their safety. Ms. Wallis said marveled at how “nonchalant” some people appeared to be about the disorder, pointing to a viral video on social media that appeared to show a couple relaxing in a cafe last weekend while fires burned outside. “I thought, 'OK, that's the French,'” Ms. Wallis said. “The city's burning and y'all are just sitting there.” Mark Landler The protest in Paris has drawn an estimated 110,000 people, according to the authorities, roughly the same number as turned out last weekend. That is a strong showing, given the rainy weather and fears of another outbreak of violence. Though the protests in Paris have been mainly peaceful, police just began dispersing protesters with a water cannon. Unrest has also broken out in other cities: Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Lille. Ben Hubbard Clashes have broken out between protesters and police in Marseille near Porte d'Aix, an arch where an authorized protest march was supposed to conclude. Young men, many with their faces covered, some wearing gas or ski masks, dragged large sheets of metal into the street as barricades, while others threw rocks and bottles at riot police or set off fireworks in their direction. The police fired volleys of tear gas and at one point pushed forward with shields and batons, pushing back the protesters. Ben Hubbard In Marseille, the police have fired tear gas at protesters near what was supposed to be the end of an approved demonstration. It was not immediately clear what prompted it. Thousands of people marched through the city peacefully and had started to congregate at Porte d'Aix, an arch in a city square. Some of the marchers continued down a nearby street where clouds of tear gas filled the air, sending crowds of protesters rushing back toward the square. Ben Hubbard At the demonstration in Marseille, two students doing advanced courses at a public high school listed their grievances: insufficient toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms, a shortage of teachers, and cold classrooms in the winter. One, Arthur Chaud, 21, said most students understand why they are protesting even if their families and others are bothered by the vandalism that sometimes has accompanied the protests. “The people criticize us when things get broken,” said Eva Ikhlef, 19. “But it is only when things get broken that we get the attention of the authorities.” Ben Hubbard The number of protesters in Marseille has grown to several thousand, including university and high school students, adults and some parents with young children. Police searched the backpacks and sometimes coats of people coming to the protest. The demonstration remained peaceful as the crowd began its march along an approved route through the city. Mark Landler Politicians continued trading accusations about who was responsible for the unrest last week. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said new arrests on Saturday showed the determination of “far left and radical left-wing movements” to stir up trouble. The leader of France's main far-left party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused the government of antagonizing protesters by changing their routes at the last minute. “There really is a deliberate attempt to provoke,” he said. Catherine Porter The protest location in Paris was changed at the last minute. Still, thousands and thousands of people have come to the site, on the southeast edge of the city, to protest. The crowd is so thick that it's hard to move through it. Many people were angry about the location change. “It's a strategy to divide and discourage people,” said Vincent Charache, 35, a municipal worker who traveled two hours by train from Nevers to protest the increasing gap between the country's growing numbers of rich and poor. “They want to make us invisible on the edge of Paris,” said Meylan Eponoh, 19, a social work student who had come in from the city's eastern suburbs to protest the underfunding of schools in the country's working-class suburbs. He said he hoped the protest would change its course to enter the city center. Ségolène Le Stradic The demonstration in Orléans ended peacefully, without any clashes with the police. Thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets of Saturday morning are now gathered in an area where volunteers are selling food and drinks. Politicians — including the mayor of Trappes, Ali Rabeh — and high school students are delivering speeches on a stage, drawing cheers from the crowd. Ben Hubbard Thousands of protesters gathered in Stalingrad Square in Marseille for the start of the only protest march permitted in the city on Saturday. Many were high school and university students protesting what they describe as poor conditions in their schools. “Power to the people, by the people and for the people,” read a cardboard sign carried by Soulaya Lounis, 18, a first year student in foreign language at a nearby university. Her state scholarship was two months late, she said. Her friend, Carla Avarello, 19, said her psychology program at a public university had been so crowded that some students had had to sit on the ground. She transferred to a private university to study real estate but said many of her fellow students did not have the ability ro change schools. Mark Landler The police have arrested 135 people so far on Saturday, according to the French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez. Most were detained during police checks for possessing weapons or other prohibited goods. Among them, he said, were fireworks launchers and a Japanese samurai-style sword. Nuñez estimated there were 35,000 people on the streets nationwide, fewer than at this time last Saturday. “We're going to stay extremely watchful this afternoon,” Nuñez added. Catherine Porter I've just crossed a big part of Paris by bike. The city feels eerily empty, with few people sitting at the outdoor cafes that are open. I started at the Arc de Triomphe, which is closed to tourists and encircled by police vans. I passed the Louvre, which was locked, and glided down the Rue Saint-Honoré, where many stores had been targeted last weekend and were now boarded up. Across the city, bank machines have been sealed with metal barriers. Ben Hubbard In Marseille, there is a stark difference between the central commercial district, where large international and designer brands have stores, and neighboring areas with mostly local shops. The big brands were looted during riots last Saturday. Now many of those storefronts are boarded up or closed in fear that new unrest could follow a protest planned for the afternoon. In nearby Noailles, where many residents have immigrant backgrounds from North and West Africa, few people are worried about looting. “What would they want from here?” said Hamid El Biyari, who was selling men's socks, underwear and jackets in a small shop. “They go for the big brands” Zibouche Mehdi, who runs a spice market, said he didn't expect any trouble to spill into the neighborhood and that he would be open all day. Ségolène Le Stradic Several politicians have joined the protest against the far-right in Orléans, including Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of St.-Denis Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, a suburb north of Paris. A member of France Unbowed, France's main far-left party, Bagayoko has become a central figure in the student protests . “What is currently being championed by university and high school students resonates perfectly with what is unfolding in Orléans,” he said while marching on Saturday. “These movements have clearly grasped that we are caught in a dynamic that, if left unchecked, threatens to upend France and, regrettably, risks plunging the nation back into the dark chapters of its past, namely racism and fascism.” Catherine Porter The Place de la Bastille, a site from the French Revolution, has been the site of many protests over the past month. It is eerily empty this morning, after the police stopped the protest from happening here. Motorcycle officers roar by in groups, a water cannon is parked nearby and officers patrol in groups. Over a loudspeaker, the police repeat an announcement that people trying to protest here will be fined 135 euros. “It's not possible to stay here, regardless of why you are here. I ask you to leave the square,” it says. Ségolène Le Stradic Shops are boarded up in Orléans, where the police are patrolling largely empty streets as thousands gather to protest. Ségolène Le Stradic The local authorities said 11,000 protesters are gathered in Orléans for the demonstration against the National Rally. Organizers in the crowd said 26,000 had joined.