France riots: around 1,500 shops looted and wrecked in protests

During the protests in France, mobs of looters ransacked shops, and small business owners suffered the most. According to Bompard, head of the Federation of Commerce and Distribution, quoted by the French press, around 1,500 shops across the country were hit, and the damage will reach “several hundred million euros”. It is still too early to calculate the losses precisely.

The violence did not spare only boutiques with expensive goods or big chains. Countless small shops and businesses on the streets around Paris’s Place de la République were also targeted. Many owners were injured while trying in vain to protect their livelihoods.

“They took everything”

Reporters for a French newspaper describe the night of Sunday like this: in streets strewn with shards, you had to walk through wine, shower gel, ketchup, ice cream and ash, while the air hung heavy with smoke from fires and tear gas, with which police units tried to stop the looting until late at night.

One of the wrecked businesses was a hair salon on Boulevard de Magenta run by the Malaine couple. The owner was taping up the front door while his wife wept among trampled magazines, overturned chairs and smashed mirrors. “We have to protect our salon for the night somehow. They took everything – cosmetics, coffee machines, even the till,” Mr Malaine said. “I don’t understand it, we have nothing to do with the protests,” he added.

The looters spared neither a florist nor a newly opened bakery. On the neighbouring Rue Beaurepaire, they ransacked a Franprix supermarket: behind the torn-out shutter the shelves gaped empty, and goods lay on the floor or had been stolen.

At one point a young woman from the protest stood in front of the shop, loudly objecting to the looting and pushing away men in balaclavas. “Stop it. Why are you doing this? This is not what the protests are for,” she shouted. Several masked men easily pulled her aside, mockingly remarking that it was “snack time”. Next door, a pharmacy was left without a shop window, till or computers, while a young man guarded the ruins of a café: according to him, his mother was inside when it was attacked, she has a bloodied head and is now in hospital with his father.

He called the police five times

The well-known Paris second-hand shop Kilo Shop was also hit, though reporters found a guard inside: Fabien, a former soldier, declared that he was the owner’s nephew and was protecting the shop, when in fact he had simply been walking past and stayed to keep watch.

Hassan Robiul, who had opened an electronics shop only four months earlier, was less lucky: he says the looters took goods worth more than €200,000 (about 4.86 million crowns). “My life is over,” he said. The phone shop of Jahirul Azam on Boulevard de Magenta was also wrecked, and the owner was injured defending his store against masked men with crowbars and a battering ram.

“They ripped the cameras out of the CCTV system and then stole 50 iPhones, 70 Samsungs and about fifty computers, including about twenty MacBooks. Plus €8,000 in cash from the till. In total the damage is at least €140,000,” Azam calculated. “I called the police five times, and every time they told me they could do nothing,” he added.

In Nice, in the south of France, a salesman at a branch of the Zing chain, which sells comics, games and pop-culture merchandise, drew attention on social media as he defended the entrance while attackers threw stones at him and hit him from behind. And in Lille, where a similar shop had no defender, thousands of collectible Pokémon cards were left lying in the street after the looting.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz