“You can’t tell who is who,” said Zahed Quaraishi, an English banker who lives on the Avenue Kléber. He watched from his balcony last Saturday as a gang destroyed his car with crowbars. “I came down to try to move it, but there were whole groups of them,” he said. He watched the mobs burn other cars as well. This weekend, he is leaving town.
The French interior minister, Christophe Castaner, warned of more, and potentially worse, violence this weekend. “Everything makes us think that radical elements, anti-state dissidents, will once again try to mobilize,” he said at a news conference on Friday.
While the number of demonstrators is expected to be smaller than on previous weekends, “within that group, there are ultraviolent people,” Mr. Castaner said. He added that the Yellow Vests “have given birth to a monster that has escaped from its progenitors” and that there are “groups of extremists who dream of making the Republic tremble.”
One Yellow Vest spokesman on Friday called on movement supporters to avoid Paris.
All over central Paris on Friday, banks — a target of last week’s violence — put plywood over windows to a chorus of buzz saws. On Avenue Kléber bank after bank had been smashed.
Businesses throughout the center prepared to shut for the day on Saturday. Cafes and brasseries closed. Nothing is to remain open on the Champs-Élysées, site of the biggest mobilizations of demonstrators, or on adjacent streets, by order of the Paris police. Museums and leading monuments will be closed, as well as the city’s department stores.
Saturday’s security apparatus will be “large scale” Mr. Castaner promised, with some 89,000 police officers deployed, 8,000 in Paris alone, nearly double the number from last week.