More than a thousand people, mostly young people, had gathered in the calm in the early afternoon Place de la République, at the call of Rennes collectives on social networks. An "unauthorized" demonstration according to the prefecture.
Targeted by projectiles fired by young people dressed in black, the police responded with numerous tear gas shots and the intervention of a water cannon.
A mobile gendarme was wounded during these clashes, according to the prefecture. Eight people were arrested shortly after 17 p.m.
On the Place de la République where they were quartered, thugs damaged the front of a CIC bank branch. Furniture and computers were taken out on the sidewalk and set on fire.
Clashes between police and protesters opposed to the pension reform, after its promulgation, on April 15, 2023 in Rennes © LOU BENOIST / AFP
They also ransacked the lobby of a nearby Mercure hotel, tagging "the bourgeois at the RSA" on the front of the establishment.
A car parked in a parking lot adjacent to the Place de la République was completely set on fire, another partially burned and several premium brand vehicles had their windows broken. Various garbage fires were also lit.
The demonstration was framed by a large police apparatus, the day after a series of excesses in the center of the city where the doors of a police station and a former convent converted into a convention center, the Couvent des Jacobins, had been set on fire, and many storefronts vandalized.
"I don't want to be the generation that let this reform pass," Benoît, 24, who has participated in almost all the protests against the pension reform, told AFP.
Clashes between police and protesters opposed to the pension reform, after its promulgation, on April 15, 2023 in Rennes © LOU BENOIST / AFP
The young man expresses his anger at having discovered when he woke up that President Emmanuel Macron had promulgated the law in the night, a few hours after the validation of the essence of the reform by the Constitutional Council.
"To learn when he wakes up that he did this quietly in the night, it's abused. It continues in the tradition of someone totalitarian and who does not want to respect the popular word," he adds.
Three men were taken into custody after clashes on Friday night in the center of Rennes.
The prosecutor's office, which denounced "serious" events, seized the territorial direction of the judicial police of Rennes for "degradation by fire" of these two buildings, "under the qualification of degradation by dangerous means and criminal association".
The doors of a police station set on fire during a protest in Rennes, western France, on April 14, 2023 after the Constitutional Council's decision to validate the essence of the pension © reform DAMIEN MEYER / AFP
The center of Rennes has regularly been the scene of many violence between police and demonstrators, accompanied by damage to shops or street furniture, since the beginning of the movement against the pension reform.
The Ministry of the Interior had announced Friday evening the sending to the Breton capital, from Saturday, of the CRS 8, based in Bièves (Essonne) and specialized in urban violence.
© 2023 AFP