What We Saw at Fast-Track Trials of Riot Suspects in France

A video production student accused of hurling cobblestones at the police and helping to build a barricade.

A teenager accused of throwing bottles, setting off fireworks and carrying stolen goods, including seven pairs of glasses.

Two friends who admitted that they had helped themselves to whiskey bottles from a ransacked supermarket to celebrate one of their birthdays.

These were among the carousel of people being tried in expedited and sometimes tumultuous fashion on Tuesday in a large glass tower of the Tribunal de Paris, France’s biggest courthouse. After days of chaos spurred by the country’s largest riots in years, this was the front line of the French state’s attempt to reassert control and punish people involved in the unrest.

By Tuesday, more than 2,500 people had been detained across the country, including about 550 in Paris. They were a small minority of the more than half a million people who joined protests on Saturday. There were still so many of them that the courthouse doubled the number of courtrooms that it typically reserves for a form of fast-track trial often used for lower-level crimes in which someone is caught red-handed.

The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, has instructed prosecutors to seek harsh sentences. He promised to come down hard on those who turned largely peaceful protests into riots that led to attacks on government buildings and the looting of more than 3,000 businesses. He called the first convictions this week “just the beginning of the guilty verdicts.”

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