US President Donald Trump weighed in on the disorder Tuesday, calling the violence a "full-on revolution" rather than a protest and urging France to "remove insurrectionists" from the country. His remarks came as French police acknowledged underestimating the scale of the weekend unrest and struggling to contain widespread looting, with Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez conceding that officers "lost control."
The government has pledged financial support for business owners facing heavy losses and is preparing what Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called a "massive" police deployment for fresh demonstrations scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 24. Soldiers from Operation Sentinelle, a domestic counterterrorism force created in 2015, will guard sensitive sites during the weekend rallies to free up police and gendarmes for crowd control.