Emmanuel Macron is urging parents to keep teenagers at home to quell rioting spreading across France and says social media is fuelling copycat violence.
After a second crisis meeting with senior ministers, the French President said on Friday that social networks are playing a "considerable role" in the spreading unrest triggered by the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old boy.
He said he wants social media such as Snapchat and TikTok to remove sensitive content and that violence is being organised online.
Of young rioters, he said: "We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living in the streets the video games that have intoxicated them."
Some 875 people were arrested overnight as riots took place across France as violence erupted for the third night in a row in protest over the fatal shooting of the teenager, who has been dentified as Nahel M.
In Nanterre, the working-class town on the western outskirts of Paris where the boy was shot dead on Tuesday, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police on Thursday night following an earlier peaceful vigil held to pay tribute to the youth.
The police officer accused of shooting Nahel dead during a traffic stop on Tuesday was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met”.
The detained police officer’s lawyer, speaking on French TV channel BFMTV, said the officer was sorry and “devastated”.
The officer did what he thought was necessary in the moment, lawyer Laurent-Franck Lienard told the news outlet.
“He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people,” Mr Lienard said of the officer, whose name has not been released. He really didn’t want to kill. But now he must defend himself, as he’s the one who’s detained and sleeping in prison.”
Mr Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel on Tuesday because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in a bus lane.
He allegedly ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.
The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Mr Prache.
The officers said they felt “threatened” as the car drove off.
In central Paris, a Nike shoe store was broken into on Thursday night as protests descended into looting and mobs stormed into the Chatelet shopping complex close to Notre Dame Cathedral.
“Dozens of youths smashed the windows of sports stores, and then started stealing clothes and shoes,” said a police spokesman.
There were similar scenes in cities and towns across France in the early hours of Friday, particularly in the southern city of Marseille.
Town halls, police cars, and trains were all torched nationwide on Thursday night, while gangs fought running battles with police, who responded with teargas and baton charges.
Twelve buses were set on fire in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers alone, while an overnight curfew was imposed in the nearby town of Clamart.
Tens of thousands of police officers have been deployed to quell the protests, which have gripped the country three nights in a row.
The shooting captured on video shocked France and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The teenager’s family and their lawyers have not said the police shooting was race-related and they did not release his surname or details about him.
Still, anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour.
French President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency security meeting on Thursday about the violence, and is set to hold another on Friday morning.
“These acts are totally unjustifiable,” Mr Macron said at the beginning of the meeting, which aimed at securing hot spots and planning for the coming days “so full peace can return”.
