‘Yellow vest’ protesters clash with French police on Bastille Day
(VOVWORLD) - French police fired tear gas to disperse protesters from Paris’s Champs Elysees avenue on Sunday, a few hours after President Emmanuel Macron had reviewed the traditional Bastille Day military parade alongside other European leaders.
French police forces fire tear gas to disperse protesters from Champs Elysees avenue on July 14, 2019. (Photo: AFP/ VNA)
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The famous boulevard was reopened to traffic as soon as the parade finished, but a few hundred protesters from the grassroots ‘yellow vests’ movement tried to occupy it. Some tried to block the road with metal barricades, dustbins, and other debris.
Earlier a French police source and a court source said 152 people – whom they linked to the 'yellow vests' – had been detained near the Champs Elysees as they tried to stage a protest. The number of ‘yellow vest’ protesters has dwindled to a few hundred recently from a high of around 300,000 nationwide in November when demonstrations started against fuel price hikes and later morphed into a general discontent against Macron’s policies and government.