A nationwide wave of antigovernment protests swept across France, filling streets with smoke, burning barricades and tear gas as demonstrators rallied against budget cuts and political instability.

The “Block Everything” campaign created a formidable test for President Emmanuel Macron and transformed Sebastien Lecornu’s first day as prime minister into an immediate crisis.

While the movement did not achieve its goal of total national disruption on Wednesday, it successfully paralysed significant portions of daily life and ignited hundreds of flashpoints throughout the country.

Despite deploying 80,000 police officers who dismantled barricades and arrested hundreds, disturbances multiplied across France. Protesters torched a bus in Rennes, while severed electric cables in the southwest halted train service and created traffic chaos.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau reported nearly 200,000 demonstrators nationwide by evening, though the CGT union claimed closer to 250,000 participants.

His ministry documented more than 450 arrests, hundreds in custody, more than a dozen injured officers, and upwards of 800 protest actions ranging from rallies to street fires. Retailleau declared the day “a defeat for those who wanted to block the country”, yet the government’s own statistics suggested otherwise.

The “Bloquons Tout” protests, while not matching the scale of France’s 2018 yellow vest movement, highlighted the recurring pattern of unrest during Macron’s presidency: Huge police deployments, violent outbursts, and persistent confrontations between government and citizenry.

Since his 2022 re-election, Macron has faced intense public anger over controversial pension reforms, and nationwide riots following the 2023 police killing of a teenager in Paris’s suburbs.

The demonstrations and intermittent clashes with riot police across Paris and beyond intensified the sense of crisis enveloping France after the government’s collapse on Monday, when former Prime Minister Francois Bayrou lost a parliamentary confidence vote.

The protests immediately confronted Bayrou’s successor, Lecornu, who took office on Wednesday.