250 protesters held after clashes with cops as France gets new PM

Protesters blocked roads, lit blazes and were met with volleys of tear gas on Wednesday in Paris and elsewhere in France, heaping pressure on President Emmanuel Macron by attempting to give his new PM Sebastien Lecornu a baptism of fire. The government's Interior Ministry announced 250 arrests in the first hours of what was a planned day of nationwide demonstrations against Macron, Budget cuts and other complaints.

Although falling short of its self-declared intention to “Block Everything”, the protest movement that started online over the summer caused widespread hot spots of disruption, defying an exceptional deployment of 80,000 police who broke up barricades and swiftly made arrests. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said a bus was set on fire in the western city of Rennes. In the southwest, fire damage to electrical cables stopped train services on one line and disrupted traffic on another, government transport authorities said.

The protests appeared so far to be less intense than previous bouts of unrest that have sporadically rocked Macron in both his first and ongoing second term as the President.