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The French interior ministry said the turnout on Saturday was 320,000.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government also said it would deploy 500 army troops alongside police in Milan by the end of the year after masked groups looted shops in the fashion capital and elsewhere and threw projectiles at police earlier this month.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Rome and other cities and towns across the country on Friday.
The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but an NBC News crew saw police use a water cannon on protesters and groups of police to disperse the protesters.
In Serbia, student-led activism also helped oust the country’s longtime leader at the ballot box.
Meanwhile, the police in Portugal early on Sunday forcibly cleared a tent camp that had been protested in Lisbon by activists protesting high housing costs.
Hundreds of protesters who shielded the tent camp were dispersed by police with signs and some baton charges, Reuters news agency reported.
While the protests across the continent have drawn comparisons for their timing, Andrew Barclay, a politics lecturer at the University of Sheffield in England, said it was important to focus on their differences.
The French protests involved “hundreds of thousands of people on the streets for many weeks, and at least initially centered on specific grievances about the funding of education,” he told NBC News.
While protests elsewhere took inspiration from the French, he said, “their scale so far has not been so great, and while the state of education continues to be a common issue, the protested issues have ballooned to include a much larger number of complaints.”
Similarly, Barclay said, the protests in Germany and France were unlikely to lead to an immediate change in governance, as they did in Serbia.
“Often protests, even quite large ones, do not capture the level of support elsewhere in the country,” he said. “I would be very careful to compare what we saw in Serbia, where students and others organized to oppose state corruption, with the kinds of protests we see elsewhere.”
