Night of violence lingers over Paris as one Chinese cafe owner counts the costs of protest

Two days have passed since the scenes of chaos and looting on Saturday, but walking down Rue Beaurepaire in Paris on Monday, one can still smell burning in the air, likely coming from the heaps of burned rubbish and charred bicycles left among the smashed shopfronts.

Among the most damaged was La Barrique, a local bar-tabac – classic French corner cafe and bar – burned down by rioters.

Its owner, Aline Li, a middle-aged Chinese immigrant from Zhejiang province, was overseeing workers boarding up the ruin. Her face is still bruised from the attack on Saturday, but she also began to smile, greeting the residents who came by to check in on her.

“I’m fine, what matters is that you guys are also OK,” she said.

The image of Li in tears on Sunday, standing in front of her torched bar with bruises on her face, was shown across French channels and on prime-time news.

She became the unfortunate face of the roughly 3,000 businesses hit by looting across France, capturing the real cost of the worst urban riot France has seen in years, and of what the French government has since admitted was an intelligence failure that left police unable to do their job.

It all started at around 2.30pm on Saturday when Li saw the protest at nearby Place de la République was turning into something violent. She and her family took in the tables and put down the metal gates.

Just as they thought they could safely wait out the surrounding anarchy from inside the cafe, the family heard shouts of, “Le tabac, le tabac, le tabac !” – referring to Li’s corner bar which also sells cigarettes – before rioters lifted the metal gates and started to smash windows and doors. Rioters then attacked her.

“We said to ourselves, there is nothing we can do, so we just let them loot,” she told journalists gathered outside the bar on Sunday.

Li said she was shocked by the children she saw in the group of looters, recalling that the first face she saw was a child of roughly 12 years old. The shop was eventually torched.

She was one of many business owners who found themselves having to defend their own properties as police were overwhelmed by the situation.

“When we called the police they told us they could not intervene,” Audélia Sitbon, the owner of a pharmacy on the same street that also got looted, told reporters.

“I have a patient who has a treatment worth of €13,000 (US$14,000) that was in my fridge, the one that they burned … he was waiting for his medicine … there are people who need their medication,” she said, in tears.

French Commerce Minister Serge Papin said on Monday that at least 3,000 businesses had been directly affected by the riots. A day earlier, Alexandre Bompard, Carrefour CEO and president of the French retail federation FCD, estimated the damage at “several hundred million euros”.

Facing the high level and cost of damages, the French government admitted that it had mismanaged the situation.

While some 550,000 people took part in Saturday’s protests across France, the government was originally only expecting around 200,000 people to show up, French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told France Inter radio on Monday.

“It means that the police presence we have in place was in certain places in asymmetry to the volume of protesters … but also troublemakers, looters and ultra-left militants,” he said.

Nunez said he presented his resignation to French President Emmanuel Macron but was rejected. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin admitted on Monday that there was an intelligence failure.

The government declared partial curfews for Paris and some other major cities on Monday. Macron’s televised speech on Sunday was criticised by most major political parties. There have already been calls for further protests on each of the next three Saturdays.

The situation in France is unlikely to calm down any time soon.