France braces for more protests

Well, I'm in the centre of Paris right now and I can hear lots of banging, lots of carpentry outside.

And this is because the shops in the centre of Paris where I am, opticians, clothing shops, pharmacies are all boarding up their windows, completely boarding up and taking all their stock out just in case of rioting and looting.

France is expecting another day of massive protests.

And these are very complex events with many types of people there.

The last time France experienced a week ago its worst urban unrest in many, many years, and it started with very peaceful demonstrations, including schoolchildren and their parents.

And over the course of the day, other groups of people became involved in lighting fires, clashes with police, and then vast amounts of looting across many cities across the whole of France.

And there's a lot of fear in the air now for what happens this time round, this Saturday.

You've been out on the streets, I believe, reporting for The Guardian.

And you've been also in Paris for 20 years doing that.

Have you seen anything like this before? And give me a sense of what it's like to be in the middle of it.

I think there have been street protests before.

There have been clashes with police before.

But what is happening is very new this time around in the scale of the number of people taking to the streets to demonstrate peacefully, but also the scale of the amount of rioting and also the scale of the police response as well.

So being here, it's very, very tense at the moment.

A week ago, we had this day of unrest, which ended in looting thousands of shops across France, including in Paris.

And then there was a second night of looting after that.

And since then, we've had curfews every night in certain parts of Paris, a helicopter with its massive beam of light coming down across the centre of the city as well, which has been very noisy, and a real sense of sadness in Paris.

parts of the city, not all of the city, but parts of the city in the centre and the east were very, very badly affected.

So, you had lots of burning barricades of, if you can picture those bikes that you can hire in big cities for tourists and locals, those bikes being dragged across the streets with other motorbikes into a pile and then lit into a fire.

And of course, the next day and the following days, you had sort of melted tarmac on the streets and these sort of piles of charred bikes.

You had also newspaper kiosks set alight in many places, traffic lights also broken, and you had many, many shops with smashed windows and shopkeepers who were extremely upset and extremely afraid.

It sounds awful.

What are the demonstrators likely to meet this weekend on the streets? What's the police response going to be? I gather that it's been hugely beefed up.

I think what you have to bear in mind in France is its policing tactics are very, very different to its European neighbours, for example.

France has a very heavy form of policing using explosive weaponry against civilians.