Laurent Nuñez offered his resignation as France's interior minister to President Emmanuel Macron, and the Élysée said the president declined it, according to BFM. The offer came after a weekend of violence in several French cities on the margins of the large mobilization of October 17, during which shops were looted and public buildings attacked.
The president's office acknowledged shortcomings, pointing to failures in anticipation and intelligence that it said led to the violence, BFM reports. Macron nonetheless asked Nuñez to roll out new methods for the security forces against rioters as quickly as possible.
Why it matters
The exchange at the top of government sets the tone for how the executive intends to answer a weekend that touched several cities at once. A minister offering to step down and being kept in place, with a public list of what went wrong, puts the focus on operational changes rather than a change of personnel. It also places the interior ministry under close scrutiny while it is being asked to deliver results quickly.
The minister's own account
Speaking on France Inter, Nuñez accepted responsibility for what happened on the ground and said that was why he had submitted his resignation. He also conceded a lack of anticipation in how police were deployed that Saturday, with 60,000 officers mobilized according to his figure.
Nuñez described the arrangement as mismatched in some places against the size of crowds — not only ordinary marches but also people he characterized as rioters, looters and ultra-left activists who, in his words, caused processions to deteriorate. He made the same point about the balance of forces in comments reported by BFM.
The Paris public prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, offered a more cautious account of who was involved. On TF1 she said she could not confirm that those responsible for violence in the capital were politically aligned with the far left, as Nuñez had stated. Most people taken into custody were largely unknown to authorities and kept silent, offering no political demands, she said. She added that not everyone who caused damage had been arrested.
Beccuau also gave figures on those held in Paris that Saturday: 557 custody measures, of which 433 involved adults, or 77 percent. She noted the age profile shifted markedly compared with the start of the school protests.
Fallout beyond Paris
The unrest was not confined to the capital. BFM reports continued clashes late into the night in central Paris, including around Place de la République and the Châtelet area, with confrontations that at times overwhelmed officers. Difficult situations were also observed in Lyon and Marseille, where luxury stores and small shops were vandalized and looted, in some cases shown live on social media.
In Rennes, a shopkeeper told of a traumatic Saturday. She said traders wanted to close but stayed to guard their premises, and that she left at 6pm as the situation became chaotic; neighbors later filmed people smashing windows, with her door forced open using a parasol and paving stones.
In Limoges, mayor Guillaume Guérin said on BFMTV that his town hall was set on fire over the weekend. He called for the national police to be given the means to keep order and argued for a change of doctrine, describing opponents as highly motivated, trained and ready for urban guerrilla tactics. He said he did not want to relive what he had experienced.
Gabriel Attal, the Renaissance presidential candidate, backed the decision to keep Nuñez in place. He said on RTL that he understood both the resignation offer and the refusal in the middle of a crisis, arguing there was no room for hesitation at the head of the interior ministry. Attal was sharper about the broader handling, describing an obvious failure in the ability to manage and anticipate the event and saying order needed to be restored urgently, with no further nights like the last. He also asked that every available means, including administrative ones, be used, and criticized what he called a sense of impunity among looters who display stolen goods online, urging that offenders be identified and punished as examples.
The Association of Mayors of France condemned the attacks and vandalism, which it said crossed an unacceptable threshold during demonstrations that themselves respected public order. It called for gatherings from midday in front of town halls to denounce what it described as serious attacks on democratic institutions.
What to watch is whether the interior ministry's promised new operational methods appear on the ground in the coming days, and how the courts handle the hundreds of cases opened after the weekend.
