FRANCE CALLS IN THE ARMY TO GUARD TRAIN STATIONS SO COPS CAN GO CHASE LOOTERS

France spent Saturday on fire. The Interior Ministry counted roughly 2,400 arrests and nearly 1,000 injured police and gendarmes, seven of them seriously, after nationwide marches over the cost of living and falling-apart schools turned into looting runs through Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Bordeaux, Lille and Toulouse. In Limoges, the crowd got inside the town hall. The government's answer is curfews and soldiers. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the National Assembly that troops from Operation Sentinelle, the 10,000-strong force that has stood outside train stations and places of worship since the 2015 attacks, will take over static guard posts so police are free to actually chase people. Paris banned carrying gasoline and gas canisters through the capital until Thursday. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised a "massive" deployment for Saturday and conceded the last plan was too static and not mobile enough, which is a polite way of admitting everybody outran his cops. On who caused this, pick a side. Lecornu says far-left groups are organizing an uprising. CGT union boss Sophie Binet says Macron ignored the cost-of-living crisis and let public services rot. The two sides cannot even agree on the crowd: the ministry counted 550,000 marchers, organizers claim 800,000. Macron watched a chunk of this from a Gulf tour, prompting one French paper to wonder whether "the misery of a reviled president is less painful in the Persian Gulf sun."

Why you should give a shit: Nobody's grocery bill got smaller this week, but the riot damage is already being estimated near a billion euros and there are soldiers posted outside the train stations, six months before France votes on Macron's replacement, which is looking increasingly likely.