If the May 1 parades mobilized strongly on Monday, they were also marked by a level of violence rarely reached since the start of the protest against the pension reform in the West of France, in Nantes, Rennes and Angers in particular. In Nantes, several hundred black blocks launched projectiles at the police who responded with tear gas or de-encirclement grenades. Four demonstrators were thus injured, including one seriously in one hand, in circumstances that have not been specified. They were hospitalized at the Nantes University Hospital, indicate the prefecture and the prosecution. The police themselves count “24 wounded among the police and gendarmes deployed on the ground”, according to the public prosecutor of Nantes, Renaud Gaudeul. By late afternoon, 29 people had been arrested.
Access to the underground car park county council was the target of a fire, an “unacceptable” act according to its president Michel Ménard. Two BMW brand vehicles were also set on fire. The windows of a Uniqlo store in the city center were smashed by cobblestones on the first floor, with the ground floor of the store protected by wooden panels following damage during a previous protest.
The town hall of Angers attacked
In Rennes, a first trade union demonstration took place calmly at the end of the morning. In the afternoon, a second demonstration organized this time in the city center, was marred by tensions between a hundred demonstrators and the police, targets of various projectiles. A gendarme was slightly injured and nine people arrested according to the prefecture. In the middle of the evening, the police evacuated Place Sainte-Anne, the heart of student Rennes and frequently one of the hotspots of protest, where some of the demonstrators had met. afternoon in a fair atmosphere. The police intervention came after fire was set to a pyre made up of pallets and topped with the flag of the Union Pirates, the dominant union at the University of Rennes 2, which had been erected at the start of the evening by activists.
In Angers, where more than 8,000 people demonstrated Monday according to the police, the police also came under fire from projectiles and incendiary devices by demonstrators, according to the prefecture. The glass doors of the town hall of Angers were degraded “with iron bars”, shops and street furniture were vandalized, according to the same source. Several people were arrested.