After the unrest: A leftist set fire to the town hall

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to be “relentless” to rioters. At dawn on Tuesday, police special forces arrested a 34-year-old man, Hodei C.D., who was identified by investigators as an alleged arsonist in Limoges City Hall. The fire of the town hall inaugurated in 1883 had shocked the French far beyond the city limits. The mayor, Republican Guillaume Guérin, accused left-wing extremist activists shortly after the devastating fire, who had thoroughly prepared the attack. Firefighters were still busy securing the heavily damaged town hall on Tuesday. The suspect is a police-known activist of the radical left. He was born in 1992 in Paris, the family comes from the Basque Country. His file bears the letter S, with which the French police marks dangerrs. This designation is given not only to Islamists, but also to people who threaten public order because of their belonging to the black bloc or other left-wing radical movements. Hodei C. D. is said to have already been noticed in the past by attacks on security forces. According to the newspaper “Le Parisien”, the suspect has taken part in actions of the French environmental movement “Les Soulèvements de la Terre” (Earth Uprising), which is critical of the system. His name has been recorded several times in the criminal record, including for violence against public officials. He is now under criminal proceedings initiated by the public prosecutor’s office in Limoges for serious damage to property in a criminal organisation. He smashed the windows of the town hall and set the fire. The man was arrested in a wild camp of alternative-left groups near the small village of Val d’Issoire, about 50 kilometres from Limoges. The mayor of the village, Pascal Godrie, said on the television channel LCI that the camp was a no-go zone. The camp residents were extremely aggressive and had declared their wild settlement a “zone à défendre”. He had never been able to enter the camp. The mayor said he thought it was likely that the suspect belonged to this actually forbidden settlement of left-wing activists. The anti-terror prosecutor’s office has been involved in the investigation, according to the French press. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin went to the Lille Criminal Court on Tuesday, welcoming “the extremely high penalties” imposed since Monday on accelerated trials of rioters and other troublemakers. Darmanin announced that 150 people are already in detention. He advocated “extremely strict jurisdiction,” but at the same time called on business owners and other stakeholders not to practice vigilant justice. The criminal courts in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and other cities scheduled special sessions on Tuesday to immediately bring alleged looters and rioters to justice. On the profile of the perpetrators, the Minister of justice said that 95 percent were men and 70 percent were adults. These include people with a migrant background, foreigners, but also people who are fully integrated. Police are currently evaluating high-pressure video footage of the businesses affected by the looting – more than 1,500 across the country – to identify more offenders. Recordings in social networks are also analyzed. Several looters filmed themselves and bragged about their loot on Tiktok or Snapchat. The night on Tuesday has been largely quiet in Paris thanks to a limited curfew. In the hall district in the heart of Paris, only residents were allowed to move freely between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Cinema, restaurants and bars have been closed to make it easier for police officers to control the streets. Local curfews were also imposed in other cities such as Lille, Bordeaux or Marseille. Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel called the curfews proof of the state’s failure. “The fact that we have to resort to such measures speaks for itself,” said Roussel. The population was rightly shocked by the looting and attacks on private housing. The National Assembly has decided to set up a parliamentary committee of inquiry. Parliament President Yaël Braun-Pivet said the committee should clarify mistakes in the police operation, but also shed light on the role of social networks and possible foreign influence. “I don’t want to forget the concerns of half a million French people who demonstrated peacefully on Saturday,” Braun-Pivet said on France Inter radio. French youth are rightly plagued by fears about the future. The debate on the riots should not push these concerns into the background. The second chamber of parliament, the Senate, has also set up a committee to investigate the reasons for the security fiasco. The right-wing Senate President Gérard Larcher suggested in the newspaper “Le Figaro” a ban on the left party La France Insoumise (LFI). “LFI bears a large part of the responsibility for hate speech,” Larcher said.