More than a million French people took part in protests against pension reform

More than a million people took part in demonstrations against the pension reform, which took place on Thursday in many major French cities. Such data was brought to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic. The ministry recalled that on the previous day of general protest on March 15, the number of demonstrators was half that. The record number of protesters was noted on March 7 – almost 1.3 million people.

In Paris, according to authorities, on Thursday 119,000 protesters took to the streets, which was a record for the French capital.

In turn, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) published its own calculations, according to which, about 800 thousand demonstrators participated in the protests in Paris. In total, in France, according to the information of the trade union center, the number of demonstrators this time amounted to 3.5 million people. Approximately the same number, according to the organizers, took to the streets of French cities on March 7.

The largest protests in terms of the number of participants were held that day in Marseille, Toulouse, Rennes, Nantes, Nice, Bordeaux, Toulon and Lyon.

In Paris, a protest action that began peacefully quickly escalated into clashes between demonstrators and the police. To disperse the hooligans who threw bottles, stones and firecrackers at the police, law enforcement officers had to repeatedly use tear gas. As the column of demonstrators moved through the streets, radical protesters smashed shop windows, bus stops, billboards, set fire to garbage cans and bicycles. According to the latest data, almost three dozen demonstrators were detained for illegal actions, in particular for trying to bring weapons into the march area.

In total, according to police estimates, there were 1.5 thousand hooligans among the demonstrators, many of whom had specially arrived that day from the suburbs of Paris. During the dispersal of radical protesters, a policeman was injured, who was hit on the head with a stone. According to doctors, he is in a state of moderate severity.

The riots flared up with renewed vigor in the evening, when the column of demonstrators reached the end point of the route – Opera Square, located in the historic center of the city. Here, the demonstrators set fire to a newsstand and tried to smash the windows of several shops. In response, the police used tear gas. So far, the police have managed to bring the situation under control.