Nice Mayor Éric Ciotti is demanding terrorism investigations into weekend riots that injured nearly a thousand officers, and wants Antifa-linked groups banned for good.
Éric Ciotti, the mayor of Nice and leader of the Union of the Right for the Republic, said prosecutors should treat the weekend’s urban violence as terrorism after rioters attacked police, looted shops, and set fire to government buildings across France.
French Interior Ministry figures put Saturday’s toll at 2,397 arrests and 997 injured police officers and gendarmes. Ciotti pointed to far-left militants, Antifa networks, and what he called “Islamo-Leftism,” and urged the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office to take the lead.
Former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, now a presidential candidate for Les Républicains, pressed President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday to declare a state of emergency. Macron has largely declined to impose a harder clampdown on a protest movement that has run nearly a month.
Nice is France’s fifth-largest city. Ciotti said the unrest there was not random street disorder. Rioters tried to hit the town hall and police stations, he said, matching a pattern of attacks on public buildings in other cities.
Breitbart reported Ciotti’s call for the anti-terror prosecutor to move first against organized far-left structures.
Ciotti stated:
“The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office needs to step in and track down these far-left groups, these coordinated, organized structures that seek to attack the institutions of the Republic. It’s clear that institutions were targeted, not just in other cities, but here in our own city as well. They attempted to attack the town hall, for instance, and they also targeted police stations,”
He went further, framing the mix of actors as a single threat with political direction.
Ciotti said:
“We are facing a red fascism, a French Intifada, a form of insurrection where Islamists, Antifa members, rioters, and looters, remotely controlled by the far left with terrorist aims, converge,”
He also claimed demonstrators flew “more Palestinian flags than French flags.” He called for groups that support the violence to be dissolved and for Antifa-style militant outfits to be banned.
The Interior Ministry’s Saturday count, 2,397 arrests and 997 injured officers and gendarmes, is the clearest official measure of the weekend surge. The protest wave began over education complaints, then slid into attacks on police, mass looting, and arson against government sites.
Retailleau argued the state’s basic authority is under simultaneous pressure nationwide. Ordinary policing tools, he said, no longer match the scale.
Retailleau said:
“It is the authority of the State that is being challenged, everywhere, all at once,”
He added:
“Faced with diffuse violence, simultaneous across the entire territory and likely to continue night after night, ordinary means are no longer sufficient.”
A state of emergency, in his telling, would allow curfews, bans on gatherings likely to turn violent, house arrest for identified ringleaders, wider identity checks, and blocks on groups organizing in public. He also wanted fast court appearances, detention for anyone who assaulted police, gendarmes, firefighters, or elected officials, and accountability that reaches the families of minors involved.
Retailleau put the demand this way:
“The state of emergency must be accompanied by a firm and swift criminal response: immediate court appearances, detention for those who have assaulted police officers, gendarmes, firefighters, and elected officials, and accountability for perpetrators as well as the families of minors. The French expect the State to protect them, by all means necessary,”
Macron has faced criticism for refusing a tougher line and for failing to address immigration’s role in the unrest. His government and police have instead pointed at La France Insoumise, the far-left party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for stoking the riots and steering a youth movement.
LFI figures, including Mélenchon, have appeared at earlier demonstrations. The party maintains open ties to Antifa-linked groups, among them the banned Young Guard, founded by an LFI lawmaker. Ciotti wants those networks chased to the end and supporting associations dissolved.
He also laid out a harder domestic package: jury trials for rioters who attacked police, emergency prison capacity, and the withdrawal of social benefits and state housing from families of those involved.
Another large demonstration is set for November 5. Ciotti said it should be banned after the looting, the assaults on officers, and the damage to public buildings. “After the looting, the attacks on our police officers, and the damage to our institutions, we cannot take the risk of further violence... the Republic must enforce its authority!” he said.
Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour offered a blunt reading of who filled the streets. “We see their faces, we hear their voices, we recognize their language... We know who they are, we know where they come from,” he said. He described the drive behind much of the unrest as hatred of the country and a desire for revenge over colonialism, not the protest movement’s stated aims.
Paris saw marchers on October 17, 2026, under a cost-of-living banner as part of the wider national actions. The weekend that followed produced the Interior Ministry’s arrest and injury totals and the fresh calls for emergency powers.
Ciotti, an ally of National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, is treating the violence as an organized challenge to the Republic rather than a string of local outbursts. Retailleau is pressing the same point from the center-right: the state is being tested in many places at once, and delay only invites another night of the same.
When nearly a thousand officers are hurt in a single day’s disorder and mayors report attempts on town halls and police stations, soft process is not public safety, it is an invitation to the next round.
