More than a billion euros. It is the tremendous bill in damages that, according to estimates by the French employers, leave this outbreak of the ‘banlieue’ and the delinquency that what took advantage in the more than 200 affected localities.

“With some neighbors that do not understand nothing, why are its streets devastated and things that everyone uses, destroyed”, explains French television. They take accounts in their news and programs: thousands of charred containers at 300 euros each; the public transport stops you throw to pieces, at 16,000. Or the urban bus fleet of communes like Aubervillers —for example— burnt down, more than two and a half million.

And so, also schools, sports centers or swimming pools that have been the object of criminal anger. And ones 5,900 private cars that have burned, one after another, mercilessly attacked with incendiary cocktails. Insurers dare to raise the cost to the €280 million.

Some of the more than 200 merchants whose establishments have been brutally looted describe it directly as a “massacre.” “Everything has been stolen, even the cash registers, before being set on fire to destroy it,” explains Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the president of MEDEF, the main French employers’ association.

“I don’t know what we are going to do, how to pay”, they lament from SMEs… from Marseille to Aimiens. For them to ease that shock, the government has already announced extraordinary aid. Also heavily attacked 300 bank offices and 250 tobacconists.

Furthermore, Roux de Bézieux warns that this calculation does not account the drop in revenue tourism sector by the impact of the news about the incidents “that have circulated around the world degrading the image of France”. He acknowledges that reservations have already been cancelled.

For affected merchants and freelancers, ask that insurers comply your word to compensate them as soon as possible. Already authorities, speed up the permits for reconstruction works or even some specific financial aid.

“In the end it is the citizen who pays“, reflects another affected trader. Because – although insurers will have to pony up and they are officially urged – part of the bill will end up being paid by all of France, public coffers. The French, after this shock from the ‘banlieue’, the most expensive of all so far, their pockets tremble today.