A schoolroom protest became the worst unrest France has seen in years. The damage is real and the state was caught short. But several of the explanations now competing for the story run ahead of the evidence. On Saturday night the clock tower of Limoges town hall collapsed into its own burning roof. The building had stood since 1883 and was listed as a historic monument in 1975 . By Sunday morning it was largely destroyed , and the regional prefect, Maurice Barate, was saying the fire had been set deliberately. Limoges was the most striking image of a weekend that left France counting the cost. Gareth Cliff, opening Monday’s Truth Report, put the mood bluntly: France is “in serious trouble”, and anyone telling viewers this is simply what France does on a Saturday is not telling the whole truth. On the first half of that argument, the record is on his side. On several of the explanations that follow, it is more complicated. What happened The interior ministry put Saturday’s nationwide turnout at 550,000; the CGT union claimed 800,000 . Most marches were peaceful. A substantial minority were not. By Sunday the ministry had counted 2,397 arrests and 997 injured police officers and gendarmes, seven of them seriously . One protester died during the main Paris march after suffering a cardiac arrest ; officials said the death was not linked to the violence. The destruction was spread across the country: Marseille: dozens of people forced the main door of city hall with barriers and iron bars , knocked over a bust of Marianne in the entrance hall and daubed the walls. The regional prefect estimated 7,000 to 8,000 rioters in the city. Mayor Benoît Payan called them thugs and demanded the severest response. Lyon: the tourist office on Place Bellecour was set alight . Paris and elsewhere: a Celine boutique on Avenue Montaigne was ransacked , a Louis Vuitton store in Marseille was looted, and in Bordeaux a Decathlon was set on fire and an Apple store stripped. Alexandre Bompard, who heads both Carrefour and the national retail federation, put the number of businesses hit at about 1,500, with losses in the hundreds of millions of euros . Carrefour alone had 50 stores affected, and Bompard has said its own losses would run into the tens of millions . That comes on top of a schools bill that the education ministry had already put at no less than €30 million before the weekend began. The state was caught short, and admits it The most consequential admission came on Monday. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, asked on France Inter whether the situation had been out of control, answered yes, on Saturday, in certain large cities . He conceded a lack of anticipation and revealed he had offered his resignation, which President Emmanuel Macron refused. The numbers explain why. About 60,000 police and gendarmes were on duty on Saturday, against 80,000 on 8 December 2018, at the height of the yellow vest protests, and 89,000 for the “Bloquons tout” mobilisation a year ago, according to the same report. For the largest protest of the current movement, the state fielded its smallest force of the three. This undercuts the idea that the government is pretending all is well. In his televised address on Sunday, Macron described the violence as unbridled, said nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it , and spoke of anger and shame. He blamed factions from the ultra-left joined by many offenders, demanded that looters repay what they took, and ordered a review of intelligence and anticipation failures. Did Macron blame America? Cliff accused the president of deflecting blame onto the United States and the war with Iran. What Macron actually did was narrower. He acknowledged that the cost of living and fuel prices were legitimate grievances, and tied the rise in fuel costs to the Gulf conflict , in which, he noted, France had taken no part. He announced a trip to Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar this week to seek supply. That is an implied criticism of the war’s architects, and it came hours after Donald Trump posted that “France is burning!” and blamed immigration. Readers can judge whether it was deflection. But Macron did not offer the Gulf as an explanation for the violence. On that, he blamed the people who carried it out. Who were the rioters? Here the evidence matters most, because the claims are the most serious. The protests began in mid-September with secondary-school pupils complaining of overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and decaying buildings . Cliff’s shorthand, “where is my maths teacher?”, is closer to the record than it may sound: of roughly 66,000 submissions to a government consultation on the movement, about a quarter concerned replacing absent staff and about half the state of school buildings . Unions, left-wing groups and yellow vest veterans joined later, and the cause widened into a cost-of-living protest . Cliff argued that the people doing most of the damage were largely first or secon