"I never imagined ... this in Paris"

PARIS — It was just the scene the French government had been dreading: burning cars seven blocks from the Eiffel Tower, shop windows smashed along one of the capital's toniest streets and columns of helmeted riot police advancing across the greensward of a prominent tourist venue.

Antoil Ethuin, 48, stood outside the shattered windows of his Bike 'n' Roll rental shop Thursday, stunned by the destruction of the worst violence in two weeks of student protests in Paris and other French cities.

"My country is broken," said Ethuin, gazing at the smoldering automobile carcasses a few yards away and the carpet of glass shards, broken dishes and computer pieces covering the sidewalk in the heart of one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods. "I never imagined I would ever see this in Paris."

Thursday's violence came at the end of a demonstration by tens of thousands of high-school and college students protesting a new job law. The unrest intensified a political crisis that now threatens to unravel President Jacques Chirac's government — much the way previous French governments have been felled by strikes and street protests when they attempted even modest reforms of the country's costly welfare state.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin — author of the contentious law that would make it easier for companies to both hire and fire young workers — has scheduled an emergency meeting with the country's most influential labor unions today in an effort to defuse the crisis.

The ongoing demonstrations have underscored the widening divide between the French government and its people at a time when France is losing both economic and political clout on the global stage. Street protests and general strikes have long been an accepted political ritual in France, and they now have become a symbol of the country's inability to reform a stagnant economy hobbled by inflexible labor laws, high taxes and a corpulent welfare system.

On Thursday afternoon, as a crowd of as many as 140,000 young people and others prepared to end their march in the large park fronting the gold-domed Hotel des Invalides housing Napoleon's tomb, gangs of hooded and masked youths darted out of side streets, setting cars ablaze, flipping others upside down, breaking store windows and hurling rocks and stones at police and firefighters, according to witnesses.

Riot police broke up the groups of rampaging youths with tear gas.

Police said 60 people were injured in the clashes, including 27 officers. They said 141 people were arrested.

The attacks followed a pattern that has emerged in the last few days of marches.

While the demonstrations have been orderly and peaceful, groups of 200 to 300 youths who police say do not appear to be participating in the organized marches have appeared suddenly during concluding rallies, taunting police and creating havoc.

Police have speculated that the gangs may be from the poor suburban areas that erupted in riots last fall. In those disturbances, suburban youths across France — many of them immigrants or French-born children of immigrants — burned thousands of cars and hundreds of buildings to protest government indifference to the joblessness and lack of social services in their communities.