Bracing for New Night of Unrest, Macron Urges Parents to Keep Teenagers Home

President Emmanuel Macron of France urgently appealed to parents on Friday as the country braced for another night of unrest over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old, with French officials saying that the protests were driven mostly by angry young people and coordinated on social media.

Mr. Macron’s government is struggling to contain the rage unleashed by the killing, in which a police officer fatally shot a teenage driver during a traffic stop in Nanterre, west of Paris, on Tuesday. Anger over the shooting tapped into decades-long complaints about police violence and persistent feelings of neglect and racial discrimination in France’s poorer urban suburbs.

Speaking at the end of a crisis cabinet meeting in Paris — the second this week — Mr. Macron called the violence “unjustifiable” and said it had “no legitimacy whatsoever.”

“There is an unacceptable manipulation of a teenager’s death,” said Mr. Macron, who had taken the rare step of leaving early from a European Union summit in Brussels to attend the crisis meeting.

A third of those arrested overnight were “young, sometimes very young,” Mr. Macron said. “It is the parents’ responsibility to keep them at home.”

Over 800 people were arrested over Thursday night after protesters burned 2,000 cars, damaged nearly 500 buildings, looted stores and clashed with riot police officers in Nanterre and dozens of cities around France, according to the Interior Ministry. In Marseille, two plainclothes police officers were badly beaten, according to Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister.

Several cities, like Strasbourg, experienced sporadic daytime vandalism and looting of stores in their city centers on Friday afternoon and evening — a departure from previous days, when the protests were almost exclusively in suburbs. Some protests in Marseille turned particularly violent on Friday evening, as rioters overturned and burned cars.

Now, the country is bracing for a potential fourth night of chaotic protests.

Late-night bus and tram services were halted around the country, since public transportation has been targeted over the past days. Authorities in several cities also canceled large events that had been planned over the next few days, including concerts at the Stade de France, north of Paris. Some cities have started banning local protests or enforcing nighttime curfews, and the government said on Friday evening that it was deploying 45,000 law enforcement officers across the country, as well as some armored vehicles.

“We are going to stop this unrest,” Mr. Darmanin told the TF1 television channel, adding that a “vast majority” of residents in the working-class neighborhoods struck by the violence had “nothing to do with several hundred or several thousand delinquents.”

The officer who fired the shot has been detained and placed under formal investigation on charges of voluntary homicide — a rare step in criminal cases involving police officers.

“I’m not angry at the police,” the mother of the shooting victim said on Thursday in an interview with France 5 television. “I’m angry at a person — the one who took my son’s life.”

The swift charges against the officer and the government’s expression of support for the teenager’s family have done little to calm tensions. Many of the protesters identify with the victim, a French citizen of North African descent who has been publicly identified only as Nahel M.

The charge under which the officer who fired the fatal shot is being investigated is punishable by up to 30 years in prison. Yet although the initial charge and detention were swift, a quick legal outcome is unlikely.

In France, defendants in the most serious criminal cases can be kept in pretrial detention for up to three years. They can appeal their detention or be granted conditional release, however, and it is unclear how long the officer, who has not been identified, will remain in custody. Police unions have argued that he is not a flight risk.

Complex criminal cases in France are handled by special magistrates with broad investigative powers, who place defendants under formal investigation when they believe the evidence points to serious wrongdoing. But the magistrates can later change the charges, or even drop them, if they do not believe they have sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.

That leaves open the possibility of an extended period of violent protests, including over the weekend. Patrick Jarry, the mayor of Nanterre, said that Nahel M.’s funeral would be held on Saturday.

On Thursday night, a school was set ablaze in the northern city of Lille, police officers were targeted with fireworks in the suburbs of Lyon, and protesters rammed a supermarket with a car in Nantes. A handful of stores were also vandalized and looted in Paris itself, which had previously experienced little unrest over the shooting. In many cities, young people threw firecrackers or shot fireworks at riot police officers, who responded with tear gas.

In Évry-Courcouronnes, a suburb south of Paris, police officers told Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne in front of television cameras that they had struggled to counter the sporadic and unpredictable unrest, which often involved small, highly mobile groups.

Asked whether the government was considering declaring a state of emergency in some areas, Ms. Borne said: “We are examining all options.” So far, though, the government has ruled out that emergency provision, which would allow the authorities to impose curfews, ban demonstrations and put people under house arrest with little judicial oversight.

Looming large is the memory of 2005, when the government declared a state of emergency to quell weeks of violent riots after the death of two teenagers fleeing the police in Clichy-sous-Bois, an impoverished northeastern suburb of Paris.

But Driss Ettazaoui, a deputy mayor in Évreux, a town in Normandy where protesters have set fire to an official building and to several schools over the past few days, said that the protesters this week were far younger than they were in 2005.

“Before, it was young people, ages 18 to 25, and now it’s 12 to 16,” he said. “And that’s very worrying.”

Mr. Ettazaoui, who is also vice president of an association of urban mayors, said a key issue in disenfranchised urban neighborhoods was the prevalence of families with single parents who often work long hours and struggle to keep an eye on their children, as ubiquitous smartphones and social media apps drive protests like “an accelerant.”

At the crisis meeting, Mr. Macron said that social networks had played a “considerable role” in helping protesters organize quickly, and in facilitating a “mimicry of violence” among young people that led to “a kind of escape from reality.”

In response, French ministers met with representatives from Meta, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok on Friday to urge them to more swiftly remove hateful or violent content that is illegal under French law.

But the government has also ramped up the deployment of security forces, using helicopters and elite police units in some places to better track and contain the unrest.

Some of the worst violence on Thursday night was concentrated in the Île-de-France region, whose president, Valérie Pécresse, said on Friday that she would push through an emergency fund of 20 million euros, or about $21.8 million, to help cities rebuild.

In Montreuil, an eastern suburb of Paris, protesters smashed the windows of businesses and looted them. In Aubervilliers, a northern suburb, charred metal carcasses were all that remained of a dozen buses after protesters broke into a depot and set them on fire.

“They are damaging and destroying their own environment,” said Mr. Ettazaoui. “It’s going to take a long time to recover from these new riots.”