A French business owner whose family had five stores completely destroyed by looters last week says this coming Saturday is the last chance for President Emmanuel Macron’s government to prove it can protect its own citizens.
“Next Saturday is your last chance to save France,” Michèle Teboul told Fox News Digital, addressing both Macron and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez directly. “If they don’t do what’s necessary to do next Saturday, I think it’s lost for France.”
Teboul’s family runs stores across Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and Montpellier. Fifteen of those locations were hit by looters; five were left completely destroyed. Attackers used axes to break through boarding that was supposed to protect the storefronts.
“We can say that five of the most important stores have been looted,” she said.
The damage goes beyond broken windows and stolen merchandise. Teboul says her family now has to pay for additional security on top of meeting new requirements from insurers before coverage will even kick in. She estimates it will take at least two months to repair and secure the stores to standard.
“I think the winter season is dead,” she said.
She warned that while larger, established companies might have the reserves to survive the disruption, younger businesses won’t. The government has promised help. “We’re going to see,” Teboul said.
In the meantime, her sons have hired security guards with dogs. Teboul says she’s heard of other shopkeepers arming themselves or buying tear gas, though she was clear her own sons have not bought weapons.
“Some have bought weapons,” she said. “You know, we are not used to weapons in France.”
A Deeper Fear
Teboul, who is Jewish and a former director of CRIF, the umbrella organization for French Jewish institutions, said many Jews in France are now weighing whether to leave the country, and that continued unrest could push more of them toward that decision.
“It’s going to be very hard to imagine a future in France for us, especially for Jews,” she said.
She stressed, however, that the violence is not a problem confined to one community. “The specific problem of last Saturday is not a problem of Jews,” she said. “The whole of France is concerned by this problem.”
Police Overwhelmed
Teboul said looters targeted street-wear and expensive merchandise and accused police of being unable to hold the line as crowds swelled in city centers, particularly in Marseille and Lyon. She said she’d heard estimates of roughly 30,000 young people converging on central Marseille, a figure Fox News Digital could not independently verify. Leading French broadcaster BFM, citing prosecutors, put the number engaged in ransacking the Marseille city center between 1,800 and 3,000.
“They were not enough,” Teboul said of the police response.
The French government has acknowledged failures in how it handled the unrest. Teboul said authorities mistook the scale of the threat for an ordinary demonstration. “Of course they could prevent it,” she said.
She drew a line between genuine protesters and opportunists. “There were two events on Saturday,” she said. “The looters, they took the opportunity that there were many people downtown, and then they came.”
For Teboul, what happens next Saturday will determine whether the government can restore any sense of safety at all.
“We have to feel secure,” she said. “We don’t feel secure for the moment.”
She didn’t stop short of naming the political stakes. “The government may fall down,” she said.
