Is Paris Burning? Yes.

From the top floor of the Centre Pompidou museum of modern art, we could see smoke from the fires on the Champs Elysée.
A reported 8,000* demonstrators were protesting because the carbon tax has raised the price of gasoline and heating fuel.
Fortunately, our planned visit to the museum was in a different part of the city, and we avoided the affected areas.

As we walked to the metro after our museum visit, we did see the demonstrators.

The demonstrators call themselves "gilets jaunes"
because they wear yellow vests as seen in the photo.

We have had a wonderful visit to Paris. If all goes as planned (and there are no demonstrators between the hotel and the airport) we'll be home tomorrow night. I'll have a number of additional blog posts about the art and sightseeing we have done this week!

* Correction to originally stated number of demonstrators. On Saturday 8,000 demonstrated in Paris altogether. In all France, according to Le Monde, 106,000 people participated in the actions. A week earlier the numbers were much larger.