Limoges city hall was destroyed over a weekend of protests and riots.

I bet your weekend was better than Emmanuel Macron’s.

On Friday, the evening before mass protests that were planned across France, he attended a Céline Dion concert in Paris with his wife, Brigitte, prompting comparisons to Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette.

On Sunday evening, he was forced to give a televised speech condemning the “unbridled violence” and riots that erupted in French cities over the weekend.

The rioters that burned makeshift barricades of bicycles in Paris, destroyed the steeple of Limoges’ town hall and set fire to Lyon’s tourism office were described as “LE CHAOS” on the front page of La Tribune Dimanche, and “SCENES D’INSURRECTION” on Le Parisien Dimanche.

By Sunday, protests had also taken place in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Today’s newsletter explains what happened in France over the weekend, and why this crisis threatens to engulf Macron’s government.

First, here are the weekend’s headlines.

Weekend roundup The Vatican | Pope Leo told a crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square on Sunday that he would “gradually resume” his activities, at his first appearance before the faithful since undergoing an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from his lung.

UK news | A “well-known individual” is trying to secure a permanent injunction against the Guardian and ITN to prevent them from publishing details of serious allegations made against him.

US politics | Donald Trump fired his immediately embattled new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, on Friday evening after just five days in the job.

The conservative commentator becomes the shortest serving occupant of the role in US history.

Reform | A Reform UK mayor is under police investigation for allegedly showing “naked and sexualised” images of himself to a female member of staff.

Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police.

Energy | The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

In depth: ‘Gen-Z is really facing a polycrisis of different issues’ Most of the protests were peaceful marches calling for change.

The smell of teargas still lingered in the Métro station at Place de la République.

“Areas of Paris looked like a wasteland,” Paolo Stuppia, a sociologist at Sciences Po in Paris, tells me.

About 855 people have been arrested in Paris, and a total of 2,400 have been arrested across France.

Lamia El Aaraje, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris, said the capital had experienced a level of violence “we had never seen before.” There have been so many incredible images of destruction (see our gallery here) that it’s possible to forget Saturday was, for the most part, defined by peaceful protests.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them schoolchildren and parents, joined marches across the country.

A far smaller group of protesters, many wearing face masks, smashed street furniture and torched cars and bus stops.

A third group took the opportunity to loot shops.

“I saw teenagers running off with shoeboxes, clothes, and perfume,” Angelique Chrisafis, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, tells me.

It’s the second group that has dominated the headlines.

On Saturday afternoon, people set the town hall in Limoges alight (its spire collapsed dramatically on Saturday evening), and broke into the city hall in Marseille.

“It wasn’t as if the peaceful protesters suddenly turned violent,” Chrisafis says.

“It was as if the government didn’t have a hold on the situation, and suddenly, the police were really caught off guard.” The peaceful protesters ‘Our future is being stolen from us’ When a small number of people break the law during otherwise peaceful protests, there’s a tendency to condemn such acts as “criminality, pure and simple” (to quote David Cameron during the 2011 London riots), and to disqualify the idea they represent a form of antagonism against authority.

“If everything was going well in France, you wouldn’t have young kids ransacking stores,” Stuppia says.

Such criminal acts can also become a means of undermining peaceful protesters.

“Some of those people are now pretty upset because they believe the government will be talking about burning barricades rather than the fact they turned out in such large numbers,” Chrisafis says.

French students have been protesting against the school system since September and calling for repairs to decrepit buildings, smaller class sizes, and reforms to a widely loathed university admissions system.

Education is a particularly fraught subject in France, where academic credentials overwhelmingly determine job prospects.

But their concerns are also broader; as Greta Thunberg put it recently, “our future is being stolen from us,” a feeling that many young people across the continent share.

The student protests have since become the focus in a constellation of different issues, ranging from the cost of living to rising fuel prices and public service cuts.

Those on Saturday drew in numerous groups, including unions and supporters of the Gilets Jaunes.

“Gen-Z is really facing a polycrisis of different issues, from the climate crisis to the rise of the far right and the use of AI” Stuppia tells me.

“And you can see the same set of issues coming alive in Italy, in Belgium, in Portugal, and with the Cockroach protests in India.