As an enormous march against an unpopular pension overhaul was winding down in Paris, small groups of young protesters began planning their next move as night fell. “Let’s go to the Bastille,” a man in his 20s told his friends.

Another, checking social media on his phone, said, “It looks like Châtelet is the meeting point,” referring to a different section of the capital.

A few minutes later, the groups slipped out of the square. And so began a “wild protest”, as the participants call such activities, in which groups of a few dozen young men and women, some clad in black and masked, roam the streets, knocking over city bikes and scooters, and setting fires while playing cat-andmouse with the police.

“Paris, rise up!” they chanted. Wild protests have become a fixture of Parisian nightlife after the French government rammed through a pension bill last week raising the retirement age to 64, from 62, without a vote in the lower house of parliament.

The wild protests are part of a larger trend that has seen previously peaceful demonstrations growing increasingly menacing as the government refuses to back down on the pension overhaul.

On Thursday, nearly 1,000 fires were lit by protesters, about 440 police officers and firefighters were injured and about the same number of demonstrators were arrested throughout France, Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said.

Support for the protesters is not universal. In a narrow street, a woman threw a bucket of water from her window at demonstrators who were setting fire to uncollected trash.

Laurent Berger, the leader of France’s biggest union, the CFDT, condemned the violence, saying that it risked undermining the fight against the pension overhaul. But for now, at least, the protesters are undeterred.

“We’ve realised that staying within the boundaries of the law doesn’t work,” said Maximilien Moreau, a 22-year-old student who has joined several wild protests, citing the numerous union-organised marches that have so far failed to make the government budge.

“If we want things to really change, we must up the ante,” he added.

On Thursday night, a motley group of several dozen young protesters set off from the Place de l’Opéra in Paris. After about half a mile walk down the Boulevard des Italiens, they dived into the capital’s cobbled streets.

In no time, they were throwing piles of trash left uncollected by protesting workers into the middle of the street, blocking traffic. Garbage cans, scaffolding, construction fences, along with bikes and scooters — virtually everything within reach — were knocked down. Each clang of a construction fence hitting the ground drew cheers.

New York Times News Service