A young man has become the first fatal casualty of the riots gripping France after falling from a supermarket roof in the northern French city of Rouen as looters pillaged surrounding stores.

The death marked another grim milestone in the mayhem that has gripped France through three days of protests and rioting following the death of an Algerian youth who was shot and killed by police during what should have been a routine traffic stop..

France’s interior minister has responded to the violence by sending 45,000 police onto the streets.

The violence has plunged President Emmanuel Macron into the gravest crisis of his leadership since the Yellow Vest protests that started in 2018.

Unrest has flared nationwide, including in cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille as well as Paris, where Nahel M, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot on Tuesday in the Nanterre suburb.

His death, caught on video, has ignited longstanding complaints among poor, racially mixed, urban communities of police violence and racism.

“The next hours will be decisive and I know I can count on your flawless efforts,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on Friday to firefighters and police officers seeking to quell unrest that has been breaking out after nightfall.

He asked local authorities to halt bus and tram traffic from 9pm local time across the whole of France. The government says all options would be considered to stop the unrest.

More than 200 people were injured and 875 arrested overnight, authorities said. Buildings and vehicles were torched, and stores looted.

While so far the worst of the violence has been confined to city suburbs, any sign it is spreading into the centres of France’s biggest cities would mark a significant escalation.

Already looters have ransacked shops including an Apple store in the eastern city of Strasbourg on Friday, a local official said. A source told Reuters that several supermarkets had been looted.

In the Chatelet Les Halles shopping mall in central Paris, a Nike shoe store was broken into, and several people were arrested after store windows were smashed along the adjacent Rue de Rivoli shopping street, police said.

Events, including two nights of concerts at the Stade de France on the outskirts of Paris, have been cancelled.

Tour de France organisers say they are ready to adapt to any situation when the race enters the country on Monday after starting in the Spanish city of Bilbao.

In the southern city of Marseille, France’s second-largest, authorities banned demonstrations set for Friday and encouraged restaurants to close outdoor areas early. They said public transport would stop at 7 pm local time.

‘We are French too’

Macron left a European Union summit in Brussels early to attend a second cabinet crisis meeting in two days. He has asked social media to remove “the most sensitive” footage of rioting and to disclose identities of users fomenting violence.

For Mohamed Jakoubi, who watched Nahel grow up as a child, the rage was fuelled by a sense of injustice in the migrant-populated banlieues after incidents of police violence against minority ethnic communities, many from former French colonies.

“We are fed up, we are French too. We are against violence, we are not scum,” he said.

Officer in ‘protective custody’

Macron denies there is systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies.

Videos on social media showed urban landscapes ablaze. A tram was set alight in the eastern city of Lyon and 12 buses gutted in a depot in Aubervilliers, northern Paris.

In Nanterre on the capital’s outskirts, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police following an earlier peaceful vigil.

In Geneva, the United Nations rights office emphasised the importance of peaceful assembly and urged French authorities to ensure that use of force by police was non-discriminatory.

The policeman whom prosecutors say acknowledged firing a lethal shot at the teenager is in preventive custody under formal investigation for voluntary homicide.

His lawyer Laurent-Franck Lienard said his client had aimed down towards the driver’s leg but was bumped, causing him to shoot towards his chest.

“Obviously (the officer) didn’t want to kill the driver,” Lienard said on BFM TV.

— AAP