Protests Keep Escalating in France. The Government Will Now Deploy the Military.

France is set to deploy the military to the streets to maintain order as protests in the country escalate.

The Sentinelle force, created in 2015 after a wave of terrorist attacks in Paris, will be used "mainly on static security missions."

French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told lawmakers that the deployment can free up police officers and gendarmes to carry out law enforcement operations.

Elsewhere, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the government will carry out a "massive" security operation next weekend to prevent new incidents. He also claimed that there will be new curfews "where the situation requires it."

The decision led to reduced chaos on Monday night, according to Lecornu. Some areas, including Les Halles and parts of central Lyon saw a curfew last night. Lille and Nice imposed curfews for minors.

The protests began in mid-September over anger with the French education system. They have continued to grow in scope and frequency ever since.

According to the French Ministry of Interior, over half a million joined the demonstrations on Saturday. Lecornu said 1,200 people had been arrested and 150 police officers had been injured.

In some areas, protests descended into looting and rioting. Shops were looted in Paris, Marseille, Nice, Nantes, Bordeaux, Limoges, Lille, Toulouse and Strasbourg, the French news agency AFP reported.

A fire lighted by protestors in Limoges, a city in southwest-central France, largely destroyed a 140-year old town hall, with videos showing the building's spire collapsing as it is engulfed by flames.

"No room for violence in our Republic. Those who have broken, attacked the prefectures as well as businesses, looted even our town halls, will be prosecuted and punished ... we will all stand united against the sowers of chaos, who seek only to bring down our institutions and prevent those who peacefully express their demands from doing so," French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X on Saturday.

The student movement that began the protests has expanded into an intergenerational one as youth concerns about the education system intersected with rising public anger at the cost of living as French fuel prices and inflation continue to surge. French year-on-year inflation hit 3.4% in September, its highest level since January 2024.

In this context, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman said France is in a "fiscally unsustainable path" and may have become "too big to save."

In an assessment published in his Substack, Krugman said the "spike in interest rates on French government bonds over the past month has been especially large" as the financial markets began to treat the country as the "economic sick man of the Western world."

France's deficit is expected to clock in at 5.1% of its GDP, same as 2025, while 2027's is set to increase to 5.7%.

France is also under the European Union's excessive deficit procedure. The country has committed to a fiscal adjustment path through 2029 aimed at bringing its deficit below the EU's 3% of GDP threshold, according to the European Commission.