Luxury brands board up Paris stores ahead of new day of protest

French luxury brands, such as Dior, Mauboussin and Louis Vuitton, protected their Paris shops with metal barriers and wooden boards on Wednesday (October 21) ahead of a new day of protest that many fear could turn violent once again.

Last weekend’s demonstrations rapidly degenerated into rampant violence and looting of stores, especially in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Limoges, which the overwhelmed police took hours to contain.

In central Paris on Wednesday, carpenters started installing wooden boards on some stores ahead of Saturday’s (October 24) protests. Carpenter Thierry Cascione said his business was on high demand amid “real fears of vandalism.”

President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday that those seeking to cause disorder at the next protests would be stopped, while Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu met union leaders in an effort to defuse one of the worst crises France has faced in recent years.

Parisian anthropologist Eric Minnaert said, though, that the looting incidents were merely a symptom of people’s struggles with rising living costs and were not representative of the protests themselves.

“We can explain them, we can analyze them, but clearly, we cannot accept them. Of course not,” he said. “But what matters is understanding the mechanics of how things reached this point.”

Government ministers have promised a vastly reinforced security operation after acknowledging shortcomings in their initial response, with troops expected to be deployed alongside additional police.