French police detain 300 after protests

A demonstrator is handcuffed by police in front of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris after students and police clashed after the march against the first job contract law on Thursday. PHOTO: EPA

Police some 300 people around France after nationwide student marches against a new labor law turned violent, as street cleaners cleared away torched cars yesterday and the government braced for more protests.

A quarter of a million people took to streets in some 200 demonstrations around the country on Thursday, in a test of strength between youth and the conservative government of 73-year-old President Jacques Chirac.

Most of the violence -- and the arrests -- were around the Sorbonne university in Paris, where police fired rubber pellets and tear gas at youths who pelted them with stones and set cars on fire. Forty-six police and riot officers were injured, according to LCI television.

A total of 187 people were detained in Paris, city police chief Pierre Mutz said on RTL radio yesterday, blaming the violence on fringe groups of radicals and anarchists -- and a few petty criminals who broke into a jewelry store in the melee.

Some people were arrested nationwide, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said. The clashes died down by late on Thursday, and no major overnight violence was reported.

"There was a demonstration that went smoothly and then there were a few delinquents who came to pick a fight," Sarkozy told reporters.

The next major test will come today, when unions and students plan to march together.

If the government faces down the escalating groundswell of protest, Chirac's prime minister and supposed preferred successor, Dominique de Villepin, and his ideas for revitalizing France will have scored a major victory heading into next year's presidential race.

If not, Villepin's presidential ambitions may be finished and the government's reforms will also be discredited.

The students' anger focuses on a new form of job contract championed by Villepin that will allow employers to fire young workers within their first two years in a job without giving a reason.

The government says the flexibility will encourage companies to hire thousands of young people, bringing down unemployment rates that run at 23 percent among young adults and around double that in some of the depressed suburbs that were shaken by weeks of riots last year.

The job contract was one of the government's responses to that violence. But students fear it will erode France's coveted labor protections and leave the young by the wayside.

Villepin on Thursday that he was "open to dialogue, in the framework of the law, to improve the first job contract" -- but showed no sign of withdrawing the measure.

Thursday's protests in Paris began peacefully, with students whistling, chanting and beating drums. Later, however, tension mounted and police and rioters waged running battles amid acrid clouds of tear gas outside the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.

Several youths threw Molotov cocktails, paving stones, metal crowd-control barriers, and tables and chairs taken from nearby cafes. Many cars were overturned or torched.