Violence erupted across France today as more than 400,000 people took part in mass protests against President Emmanuel Macron's embattled government.

Tear gas, baton charges and water canons were used by riot police for the second weekend in a row as protests took place in Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rennes and Marseille on a Saturday described as 'the longest day' by law and order officials.

The unrest came just days after thousands were arrested and demonstrations turned violent across the country last Saturday.  

In the latest incidents, around 400 activists from the Black Block movement rioted in Grenoble, southeastern France, and 'attacked the police with anything they could find,' said a local prefecture official.

There were also around 60 arrests in the Mediterranean city of Nice, where youths burned cars and dustbins, including some activists from the far-Right, according to authorities.

And in Orleans, south of Paris, some 15,000 demonstrators tried to disrupt the annual congress of the far-Right National Rally party.

As the evening arrived, the march through the capital turned to violence near its endpoint at Porte de Vincennes when masked youths began throwing projectiles at police officers, including fireworks. 

Footage emerging on social media shows armed officers in riot gear holding their shields close to their bodies before using tear gas and a water canon to disperse the crowd.

The Interior Ministry put nationwide turnout at 410,000, including 110,000 in Paris. 

The Paris prosecutor's office said 64 people had been arrested in connection with Saturday's demonstration and 40 placed in police custody. 

Those arrested included six minors. Most arrests concerned suspected weapons offenses or participation in a group preparing violence or property damage, the office said. 

Authorities had confined the capital's march to the city's southeastern edge, keeping protesters away from central neighborhoods hit by last weekend's destruction. 

Some 135 people have been arrested nationwide so far on Saturday.

Elsewhere in France, police used tear gas in Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and Strasbourg and water cannons in Nice and Nantes, French media reported. Meanwhile in Marseille, officers fired tear gas during clashes with several dozen people near the march's endpoint. 

Camille Chesnier, 27, who joined the march in Paris, said she had been unable to find work despite having an engineering degree and a master's degree.

'There are enormous numbers of people in the same situation as me but who aren't privileged and who find themselves living on the streets and in squats and, frankly, it's very tough,' she said.

Bénédicte Pittion, a 46-year-old teacher, marched through steady rain with her 16-year-old daughter, Garance, a high school student. Both had supported the movement from the start, but this was their first protest together.

'The young people who have been demonstrating have not been heard, and as a parent and as a teacher, I stand with them,' Pittion said.

Garance said she had been 'really scared' to attend after seeing images of last weekend's violence, but argued that staying away would hand the government a victory.

It came as similar protests were held in cities across Europe including Brussels, Belgium and Tirana, Albania. 

One Paris protester, a 22-year-old who asked to be identified as Robert, said: 'We've come to protect against injustice, but the government is doing everything it can to get us off the streets.

'It throws police at us, and does nothing about the long term problems of inequality and economic mismanagement.'

Shopkeepers boarded up their premises in Paris, while some areas have been in partial curfews.

Major tourist attractions including the Louvre, Orsay and Picasso museums and Grand Palais are all closed, while a home game for PSG has been moved until Monday and a number of metro stations are shut. 

Art Basel, one of the world's most prestigious contemporary art fairs, opened to the public Friday, but only for the day, with the threat of unrest prompting organizers to cancel the weekend program.

Soldiers from an anti-terrorism military unit patrolled the Champs-Elysees avenue while police vans circled the Arc de Triomphe, looking to protect some of the capital's most famous sites from any repeat of the unrest that shook France last week. 

Police said more than 100 protesters and residents were injured in Paris last Saturday. Authorities have not released a nationwide injury tally. About 2,400 people were arrested across France that day.

Officers have also faced criticism after a 17-year-old girl lost an eye while participating in a protest in Mulhouse last Saturday, while a 17-year-old boy lost a hand in Saint-Etienne.

Other teenagers have suffered disabling injuries during weeks of high school blockades and street demonstrations.

On Saturday, an investigation was opened after a photographer was severely injured in the leg by a police grenade in central Paris last Saturday.

Today's action comes a week after protesters caused chaos, leading to at least 2,500 arrests and the looting of some 2000 shops and small businesses.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said: 'We are seeing numerous calls from the radical far-Left movement to commit acts of violence.

'We will be uncompromising with those who engage in destruction, and the instruction I have given is to show the utmost firmness.'

He said police special forces units including RAID intervention squads had been mobilised.

Protests started last month against a decline in schools, with students aggrieved by teacher shortages, and overcrowded and crumbling classrooms.

Demonstrations have since mushroomed into more general anti-government rallies, and they have descended into rioting, vandalism, arson and looting.

Mr Macron has vowed to ban all demonstrations not organised by trade unions, while curfews have been imposed in major cities including Paris and Marseille.

Left-wing politicians flatly denied stirring up any trouble, and said paramilitary police units had provoked the crowds.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for France Unbowed (FLI) said too many tear gas canisters had been fired at peaceful demonstrators.

He claimed: 'It seems that confrontation is the very goal of this public-order strategy. It's pathetic.'

Ahead of this weekend, police in Paris seized a large number of 'prohibited materials' including knives, gas masks, an angle grinder, a katana, batons and googles.

Around 70,000 riot officers have been deployed across France as authorities feel the pressure to maintain order amid claims they lost control in some cities last weekend. They have also faced scrutiny over crowd-control tactics that left several teenagers seriously injured.

Last weekend, protests turned violent across the country, with town halls stormed, shops looted and the tourist information centre in Lyon and the town hall in Limoges set ablaze.

Officers have appeared outnumbered and overwhelmed after the demonstrations widened from dissatisfaction around school conditions to encompass rising living costs and general malaise with the government.

They also made several arrests, with the prefecture for the city saying authorities organised 'massive checks to deter those who might come to the capital with bad intentions'. 

Members of the gilets jaunes joined students and trade unionists as they took to the streets, but President Emmanuel Macron this week announced a crackdown on permitted protest.

He said only demonstrations organised by recognised trade unions will be allowed to go ahead today, and cities including Lyon, Nice and Montpellier have banned protests from taking place today completely.

In Orléans, around 64 miles southwest of Paris, there was a sigh of relief as a major demonstration against Marine Le Pen's far right party conference passed off peacefully despite expectations of violence.

Thousands of left wing protesters marched through the historic city of Joan of Arc, where a massive security operation was under way, with 3,000 police deployed and bridges closed, roads blocked and shops boarded up in anticipation of trouble.

But the feared confrontation between rival political camps failed to materialise.

Orléans mayor Serge Grouard said 13,000 people had joined the anti-Rassemblement National march, about half the number organisers had predicted. 

'Everything went perfectly smoothly, and I commend the CGT (trade union) for its stewardship of the march,' he told local media.

The demonstrators had come from across France to gather under the banner of fighting 'fascism, racism and imperialism'.

Among those who took part in the protest were Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure, CGT union chief Sophie Binet and Bally Bagayoko, the left-wing mayor of Saint-Denis.

The march, organised by around 50 political parties, unions and associations, had been rerouted away from the city centre amid fears that radical activists could attack shops or confront police.

On the other side of the Loire river that divides the city, thousands of Rassemblement National supporters gathered for the party's national congress, where Jordan Bardella, 31, was re-elected president after standing unopposed.

The gathering is the prelude to Sunday's main event, when Marine Le Pen is due to formally launch her campaign for next year's French presidential election before an expected audience of 10,000 supporters.

The rival gatherings have made Orléans the focus of France's increasingly bitter political divisions.

The Orléans mayor warned that the absence of trouble on Saturday afternoon did not mean the danger had passed. 'This is only the first phase, not the one that worried me most,' Grouard said.

'The second phase, as evening approaches and night falls, is only just beginning.' He warned that activists were planning unauthorised gatherings near the RN congress venue on Sunday, declaring that such protests were 'absolutely out of the question'.

The huge security operation will remain in place until the RN events closes.

In Nantes, western France, water cannon and tear gas were deployed to prevent protesters entering areas where demonstrations are forbidden. 

Hundreds of demonstrations were expected on Saturday, with a website associated with the gilets jaunes listing 500 protests and 200 other actions. 

French police forces are equipped with batons, tear gas, sound grenades and foam-round launchers, as well as riot shields equipped with powerful strobe lights designed to disorient protesters.

'Intermediate-force weapons are defensive response tools that allow law enforcement officers to respond to a threat in a graduated and proportionate manner,' French National Police said in a statement.

But critics, including families of injured teenagers, say the police have been too heavy-handed.

Some have called for bans on foam-round launchers, tear gas and stun grenades, echoing demands made by human rights groups since the violent 2018 gilets jaunes – 'yellow vest' – protests.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International called for a permanent ban on all stun grenades, saying they are designed to shock, disorient and sow panic, and that some can cause permanent hearing loss and life-changing injuries from blasts and shrapnel.

The use of such weapons reflects a broader shift in French policing toward keeping officers at a distance from protesters, said Jean-Marie Godard, an author specializing in France's internal security.

In the early 2000s, France's conservative government moved away from community policing, which emphasized foot patrols and engagement with residents, toward specialized riot-control units.

People across France's political spectrum regret abandoning the community policing model, Mr Godard said.

French policing today differs from that in many other European countries, according to Laura Keesmann, a sociologist at the University of Antwerp who led a wide-ranging comparative study of policing methods in France, the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden. In the other countries studied, police often engage directly with demonstrators, sometimes mingling with crowds to defuse tensions, she said.

'That is just really, really not the case in France,' she said. 'There's much more of an authoritarian way of policing.'

Ms Keesmann stressed, however, that French police face unusually militant and sometimes violent protesters.

On the eve of last Saturday's protests, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said his instructions were 'very clear: the police and gendarmes should be able to use the entirety of the intermediate weapons at their disposal'.

France has more than 250,000 national police officers and gendarmes. Police generally operate in cities, while gendarmes usually cover rural areas and smaller towns. Both forces fall under the Interior Ministry, which said 997 officers and gendarmes were injured during Saturday's unrest, seven of them seriously.

Mr Godard said protest movements have become increasingly decentralised as labor unions have lost influence over demonstrations, drawing a wider range of participants, including radical groups.

French authorities have blamed much of the recent violence on far-Left radicals, accusing them of orchestrating clashes with police and targeting public buildings. Others took advantage of the unrest to loot businesses, authorities said.

While protests in France have claimed most international attention, Milan, Italy, is among the many other European cities where protests took place, from Portugal to Albania.

Ahead of Saturday, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni announced a raft of measures, including sending an additional 500 soldiers to Milan, and tougher penalties for minors, who police said made up a large part of the violent protesters.

The 500 soldiers came in addition to hundreds already stationed there, and around 5,000 police and other law enforcement personnel. 

Authorities conducted drone surveillance, checks at railway stations, rapid-response units and online monitoring for potential calls to violence. 

Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala has said he was concerned about a repeat of violence this weekend and expressed support for the deployment of more soldiers.

Rioters last weekend smashed their way into stores, targeting sneakers, athletic wear and sporting goods on streets that run off the city's central Duomo square.

Officials said security measures on Saturday would extend beyond the city center amid concerns protesters could move into other neighborhoods to evade heavily policed areas.

Valter Mazzetti, secretary general of the Fsp police union, told The Associated Press that soldiers could provide immediate reinforcements, but not resolve police staffing shortages, noting that managing demonstrations requires specialized police training.

Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in a social media post that the troops lacked key tools available for public-order operations, and that soldiers were only recently allowed to use plastic restraint ties and only in areas around train stations, not throughout the city. They are not authorized to carry pepper spray or tasers, he said.

Milan police say last week's violence and looting involved about 2,000 very young protesters, a large number of whom were 'naturalized, second-generation Italians,' alongside foreign nationals. Over two days, police arrested 45 people, 34 of them minors.

Milan's welfare councilor Lamberto Bertolé told the AP that more investigation is needed to understand the backgrounds and motives of the young people who joined the looting.

'Many young people increasingly lack a sense of belonging and prospects for the future. Part of our society feels excluded, amid social and economic inequalities,' said Bertolé, a member of the center-left Democratic Party.

Security was also heightened in Rome, where authorities locked down luxury shopping streets and stepped up controls around the Circus Maximus and Piazza del Popolo ahead of planned demonstrations, including one by right-wing students.

An anti-war march was scheduled to start in the early afternoon at the central Piazza della Repubblica, and there were concerns over possible infiltration by violent groups.

Organizers sought to distance themselves from potential unrest, urging participants to keep their faces uncovered and hands visible.

Aside from Rome and Milan, demonstrations have been called in at least seven other cities. The newly formed 'October 17 Movement' has been the main driver alongside student federations, grassroots trade unions, and anti-war coalitions.

Over in Brussels, Belgian police used tear gas and pepper spray as they clashed with anti-government demonstrators calling for better conditions in the education system, Belgian media reported.

The clashes came after hundreds of mainly young protesters gathered in a continuation of rallies that have taken place in recent months, calling for more funding for education and accusing police of excessive violence.

The clashes were much smaller and less violent than those that took place last week in Belgium and — on a far larger scale — in neighboring France.

In one incident on Saturday, protesters ran and fell to the ground as police pursued them, with officers hitting and kicking one demonstrator, witnesses reported. 

Protesters threw road signs and other items onto a pile of rental scooters and bicycles and attempted to set it on fire.

In another incident, police used tear gas to disperse a group of protesters, multiple Belgian media outlets reported.

Brussels police said in a statement at the end of the afternoon that no major incidents had taken place. They said they had taken measures 'to guarantee the maintenance of public order and the security of everyone.'

Police officers temporarily detained five people for disturbing public order and detained four more for possessing prohibited weapons and for inciting rioting, the statement said.