FRANCE:Civil peace and the unity of the opposition Socialist Party (PS) were the first casualties of Nicolas Sarkozy's election as president of France on Sunday night.
The French national police headquarters revealed yesterday that 730 cars were burned across the country after Mr Sarkozy's victory, including 35 in Paris. A total of 592 people were arrested, 79 in Paris. Seventy-eight members of the security forces were injured in clashes involving barricades, burning tricolour flags and thousands of protesters.
At the Place de la Bastille, which saw some of the worst violence, a Polish radio technician was injured when youths wearing motorcycle helmets and armed with metal bars and bottles broke the windows of a radio transmission van and attacked the two technicians inside.
More than 3,000 anti-Sarkozy demonstrators gathered at the Bastille.
At about 10pm, the confrontation with security forces degenerated into a street battle, with youths throwing paving stones at gendarmes, who retaliated with tear gas and water cannon.
The demonstrators overturned cars, burned scooters and looted shops along the boulevards between the Bastille and the Gare de Lyon.
Similar incidents occurred in Bordeaux, Marseilles, Toulouse, Nantes and Clermont-Ferrand. In Lyons, rioters threw bottles, metal barriers and rubbish bins at a barge where young supporters of Mr Sarkozy's UMP party were celebrating. Five youths beat up a UMP militant and threw him in the Rhone river. Police retrieved him unharmed.
French media however gave far more coverage to the ructions within the Socialist Party and the whereabouts of the president-elect. Journalists have been reluctant to cover such violence since television crews were accused of encouraging rioters in November 2005. On average, more than 100 cars are burned every night in France.
The defeat of Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal has sparked a power struggle in her party. By delivering a televised address minutes after results were announced, the losing candidate attempted to assert her own leadership over the party.
But Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former finance minister who challenged her in the Socialist primary last year, implicitly condemned Ms Royal and her partner, François Hollande, the PS leader. "The left has never been so weak," he said. "Why is the left so weak? Because the French left still hasn't renovated itself."
Since the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin was eliminated in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, Mr Strauss-Kahn continued, the PS had failed to renew itself, "lulled by the illusions of regional and European [ electoral] victories in 2004".
The French "no longer want 20-year-old solutions", he said. "The social democratic renovation that I started did not carry the day in the Socialist camp. Now we have to undertake this renewal; that's the condition for hope, and I am available to do it."
According to Le Monde, Ms Royal and her aides decided on Saturday that she should lead the PS in the upcoming legislative elections, continue to develop her "Désirs d'avenir" association and stand for the presidency again in 2012.
Her staff say Ms Royal attempted to reform the party, but started too late and did not sufficiently explain it to her electorate.
Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister who also challenged Ms Royal for the candidacy, and who leads the left wing of the PS, opposes any move towards the centre.
Sources close to Mr Fabius said Ms Royal has not understood that she has lost, and that she was the party's candidate, not its leader.
Mr Hollande attempted to quell the dispute, saying he "would not tolerate any settling of accounts" before the June 10th and 17th legislative elections.
The national bureau of the PS papered over their differences in a meeting late yesterday. A poll published on Sunday night showed the right would win 37 per cent, the left 33 per cent and François Bayrou's centrist Democratic Movement 15 per cent in the first round of the parliamentary poll.
Mr Sarkozy, who campaigned as "the spokesman of the people", spent only 15 minutes at his victory celebration on the Place de la Concorde on Sunday night.
Johnny Halliday, the rock star who last year scandalised France by becoming a tax exile in Switzerland, joined Mr Sarkozy, his family and close friends at the expensive Fouquet's restaurant for dinner, but disappointed fans by refusing to perform.
France's new president has long cultivated comparisons with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Just before noon yesterday he emerged from the Barrère Fouquet's hotel in the Avenue George V in jeans and an open shirt, with his wife Cecilia looking like Jackie, in dark glasses and holding a bouquet.
The couple, their young son Louis and Cecilia's daughters by her first marriage, are believed to have taken refuge on a Mediterranean island.
Mr Sarkozy let it be known that he was withdrawing from the public eye so he could "inhabit the function, take the measure of the gravity of responsibility that weighs on his shoulders" before taking over next week.