Curfews, arrests and gunfire as the cost-of-living revolt returns to the French Antilles

A fresh wave of protest over high prices has brought barricades, looting and night curfews to Guadeloupe and Martinique, and a hard response from the French state.

FORT-DE-FRANCE. The cost-of-living movement that has shaken France's Caribbean territories before is back on the streets of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the French state has met it with curfews and arrests. The protests are driven again by the RPPRAC, the Rassemblement pour la protection des peuples et des ressources afro-caribeens, whose central grievance is that food prices in the two territories run roughly 40% higher than in mainland France. This is a distinct wave from the student protests over school conditions that the Ledger reported earlier in October.

In Guadeloupe, 44 people were arrested, more than half of them minors, after attempted barricades, projectile-throwing and looting in Les Abymes, Outremers360 reported on October 19. The prefect, Thierry Devimeux, imposed a curfew for minors in Pointe-a-Pitre and Les Abymes, and the prefecture said three police officers were wounded by gunfire. The public prosecutor in Pointe-a-Pitre reported 70 criminal responses in four days, and RCI Guadeloupe reported on October 21 that a 23-year-old repeat offender caught armed during the looting of a supermarket in Les Abymes was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Clashes between gendarmes and protesters closed the RN1 highway at Baie-Mahault.

In Martinique, the authorities imposed a curfew from 10 at night to 5 in the morning for 48 hours across six communes, including Fort-de-France, Schoelcher and Ducos, RCI Martinique reported on October 20. Three teenagers aged 16 and 17 were shot in Ducos on the evening of October 20, and the station reported eleven vehicle hijackings over two nights. An early prefecture toll counted more than 20 barricades, six arrests, two ransacked shops at Le Robert and Saint-Pierre, and five armed robberies, with an armored vehicle used to clear a blockade on the Boulevard Maurice Bishop in Fort-de-France. The employers' union MEDEF warned that repeated damage and blockades were harming the economy, and at least one cruise line changed its itinerary.

The political temperature is as high as the barricades. The RPPRAC's president, Rodrigue Petitot, said of the movement, "On ira jusqu'au bout," meaning the campaign would be carried to the end. The senator Victorin Lurel, by contrast, called the looting and the attacks on people "intolerables et inexcusables," intolerable and inexcusable, while urging the French state to open a dialogue because, he argued, young people's distress needs political answers rather than only a police response.

That is the unresolved question in both territories. The grievance, the gap between island prices and mainland prices, is real, long-documented and politically combustible. The response so far has been largely a security one: curfews, arrests, armored vehicles and firm sentences.

Whether Paris moves toward the negotiation Lurel is calling for, or holds to the enforcement line, will decide whether this wave subsides or hardens into the longer confrontation the French Antilles have seen before. The Ledger notes the risk of confusing this 2026 unrest with the near-identical 2024 protests and has dated every detail above to October 2026 sources.