Macron refuses the interior minister resignation over the riots, and Lecornu chairs the crisis meeting on aid, insurance and the courts

The first head offered for the weekend was the interior minister, and the president would not take it. Laurent Nunez tendered his resignation on October 18, a day after protests over living costs and public services turned into rioting and looting across France. On Monday morning the Elysee said President Macron had refused it, given the necessity for continued leadership of law enforcement at this time, and had instructed the minister to ensure transparency on the planning and intelligence failures and to put new operational methods in place quickly against looters and casseurs.

Nunez did not wait to be blamed. On France Inter he said he had offered to resign because I am responsible for everything that happens, and he acknowledged that police had lost control in some major cities because the deployment had been severely undersized relative to the number of violent participants. Turnout, he said, had been underestimated by a factor of two and a half. A video from October 6 has recirculated online in which Nunez defined losing control as a situation in which hordes paraded through city centres, looted shops and committed violence, and critics have been setting his own definition beside the scenes of October 17 and 18 ever since. Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin defended him and conceded the wider point in the same breath: he is a great minister of the interior, there is a difficult time, we have failed, unquestionably, as he himself acknowledged.

The work of Monday belonged to the prime minister. Sebastien Lecornu chaired an interministerial crisis meeting on aid for those affected, insurance and the judicial follow up, the meeting he promised in the aftermath while mayors rallied outside town halls in the hit cities. The figures the meeting worked from are the ministry figures as of October 19: 2,397 people arrested and 997 police and gendarmes injured, seven of them seriously, and about 1,500 businesses damaged according to the retail federation, with losses in the hundreds of millions of euros. Two people are dead.

The political pressure is coming from every direction at once. Yael Braun Pivet, president of the National Assembly, has said she wants an inquiry into the weekend and the reasons behind the scale of the disorder. Sophie Binet, who leads the CGT union, accused Macron of failing to address the students concerns, the cost of living and the decline of public services that brought the crowds out in the first place. New demonstrations have been announced for the coming weeks. Macron Sunday address, in which he vowed that those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable and that looters will pay back what they took, drew wide criticism from opponents who said it carried no concrete measures. The resignation refusal keeps the minister in place. It does not answer the question the mayors and the Assembly are asking, which is how a planned day of demonstrations was met with a deployment sized for a crowd less than half the one that came.

The picture with this story is an illustration, not a photograph.