FIRST ON FOX: A French business owner who had five of her family’s stores wrecked by looters last week said this coming Saturday’s protest could be a watershed moment for France.
Her message to President Emmanuel Macron: “Next Saturday is your last chance to save France,” Michele Teboul, the business owner, said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Addressing both Interior Minister Laurent Nunez and Macron, she said, “If they don’t do whatâs necessary to do next Saturday, I think it is lost for France.”
Teboul lost more than merchandise when looters ransacked 15 of the stores owned by her family, leaving five completely destroyed. She is also losing faith in whether the government of France can still protect them.
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Teboul accused authorities of failing to provide enough police to protect businesses, leaving families like hers facing destroyed stores and a costly recovery. She demanded that they protect the population before another Saturday.
Her retail operations include stores in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and Montpellier. Her sons work within the same company and operate their own brand, she said.
For her family, protections put in place before the violence proved insufficient. Attackers used axes to break through boarding, she said, leaving her sons facing a difficult recovery.
“We can say that five of the most important stores have been looted,” she said, describing those locations as “completely destroyed.”
Now, her family needs to pay for additional protection while trying to meet insurance security requirements.
Teboul said it would take at least two months to repair and secure the stores to the required standards. She described those requirements as a condition for obtaining insurance coverage, adding another obstacle to reopening and recovering the business.
“I think the winter season is dead,” she said.
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Companies with established operations and financial reserves may be able to absorb the disruption, she said. Younger businesses face a more difficult path.
“The government said they would help us,” Teboul said. “We are going to see.”
Her sons have hired security guards with dogs. She also said she had heard of other shopkeepers obtaining weapons or tear gas, emphasizing that her sons had not purchased weapons.
“Some have bought weapons,” she said. “You know, we are not used to weapons in France.”
The concern extends beyond damaged merchandise and storefronts. Teboul, who is Jewish, said that many Jews are considering leaving France and warned that further disorder could deepen that uncertainty if things don’t get better.
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“It is going to be very hard to imagine a future in France for us, especially for Jews,” she said of her hope that the coming Saturday would be different.
Teboul said Jewish schools, synagogues and community businesses have dedicated security arrangements. Teboul is a former director of CRIF, the umbrella organization representing French Jewish institutions.
She stressed, however, that the weekend’s violence was a national problem affecting people beyond the Jewish community.
“The specific problem of last Saturday is not a problem of Jews,” she said. “The whole of France is concerned by this problem.”
Teboul said looters sought streetwear and expensive merchandise. She accused police of failing to protect businesses during the unrest on Saturday, saying officers were overwhelmed as large crowds descended on city centers, particularly in Marseille and Lyon.
She cited an estimate she had heard being talked of as being around 30,000 young people arriving in central Marseille, a figure Fox News Digital could not independently verify.
Leading French broadcaster BFM reported on its X account that “Between 1,800 and 3,000 people” engaged in “the ransacking of the city center of Marseille, according to the prosecutor’s estimates.”
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“They were not enough,” she said of the police.
The French government has acknowledged failures in its response to the unrest.
She said that authorities had mistaken the threat for an ordinary demonstration. “Of course they could prevent it,” she added.
Teboul distinguished between students protesting over grievances and those who used the demonstrations as cover to steal.
“There were two events on Saturday,” she said. “The looters, they took the opportunity that there were many people downtown, and then they came.”
For Teboul, the next test is whether authorities can protect what remains of their livelihood and everyone else in the country and restore their sense of security in France.
“We have to feel secure,” she said. “We do not feel secure for the moment.”
Teboul warned that another failure to protect the population could also have consequences for the government of Emmanuel Macron.
“The government may fall down,” she said.
Fox News Digital’s Sydney Finver contributed to this report.