Business Insider– Paris’ streets were engulfed in protest for the third weekend in a row as tensions over gas prices and inequality left the city lined with burnt cars and damaged building.
Around 36,000 people demonstrated on Saturday, leaving French President Emanuel Macron searching for ways to defuse tensions. Around France, the protests have leftthree dead, more than 260 wounded and more than 400 arrested.
The Protests began as a demonstration against rising gas prices but have evolved into a broader anti-government movement.
While Saturday’s protest by the “Yellow Vest” movement had a smaller turnout than those before it, the protests were the most destructive, filling Paris’ famous streets and monuments streets with riot police and tear gas.
The prefect of Paris, Michel Delpuech, told reporters late Sunday that the police had been faced with “extreme and unprecedented violence” and that protesters had thrown hammers and steel ball bearings at them.
Scroll down to see what the protests, and their aftermath, looked like.
The “Yellow Vest” protest movement is made up largely of people that are angry about rising fuel taxes and wider inequality in France
Saturday’s protests took over central Paris. Here, demonstrators are pictured at the Place de l’Etoile.
Riot police were dispatched to the protests.
Protestors lit fires near the Arc de Triomphe.
Macron met with police firefighters on Sunday, and visited damaged buildings in the city.
A woman was wounded by a water canon as protesters clashed with riot police.
Teargas surrounded protestors as they demonstrated.
Graffiti that says “the yellow vests will triumph” and disparages President Macron was scrawled on monuments like the Arc de Triomphe.
Cleanup operations were underway on Sunday.
Protestors and the police faced off on Paris’ streets.
Firefighters worked to extinguish flaming cars in the center of the city.
President Macron has asked the prime minister and the main political parties to meet with Yellow Vest representatives in an effort to diffuse the situation.
Source: CNN.