Curfews extended for a third night

Prefects in Paris and Lyon extended night curfews for Wednesday, 21 October 2026, after violence and looting during the weekend of 17 and 18 October on the margins of a social mobilisation. In Paris, the police prefecture ordered a curfew from 23:00 on Wednesday to 06:00 on Thursday in certain sectors, including the Place de la République, and the order covers both minors and adults. A second order bans any undeclared gathering from 20:00 Wednesday to 06:00 Thursday, notably around the Élysée, the National Assembly, the Senate, the Champs-Élysées avenue and railway stations. Inside Paris, the curfew goes further by prohibiting any presence in narrower perimeters around the Place de la République and the Les Halles sector. Wednesday is the third consecutive night that both measures have been in force, following instructions sent to all prefects by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.

Policing and the first nights

Police have set up a deployment to ensure the measures are respected, and a National Gendarmerie helicopter was brought in on Wednesday evening to support it. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the curfew had worked during the first night, which ran from Monday to Tuesday. Speaking on Tuesday evening, she described the situation in the French capital in these words:

“The night just past was particularly calm across the Paris area.”

The measures were then extended for a further two nights, with the same arrangements applying to minors and adults in Paris from Monday onward. The police prefecture has presented the deployment as a strict enforcement operation, and the curfews are now set to run until early Thursday morning.

Lyon and reactions in Paris

In Lyon, the Rhône prefect decided on Wednesday to renew the curfew in the hyper-centre for the third consecutive night, arguing that it helps keep the streets of the Presqu'île calm. That curfew runs from 23:00 until 06:00 on Thursday morning, two hours later than the previous ones, which began at 21:00, according to the prefecture. In Paris, Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire of the Socialist Party said he backed the call for calm expressed by a large part of residents and Parisians, and he stressed the exceptional nature of the measure. The criticism came from inside the city's municipal majority, where the Paris Ecologists sit, and they described the curfew as a serious infringement of public freedoms.

Prefecture websites go offline

Separately, the websites of several prefectures, including the Paris police prefecture, have been unavailable since Wednesday afternoon, 21 October. The Interior Ministry said the sites were taken offline on the recommendation of Anssi, the national agency for information systems security, after a critical vulnerability was detected. The ministry said the flaw had been announced a few hours earlier by the publisher of a generic software component that is widely used around the world. Government services are now waiting for the publisher to release a fix so that access can be restored safely. The ministry said:

“Teams are mobilised to carry out the update operations as soon as possible, once the security fix is made available by the publisher.”