People Burned 874 Cars In France On New Year's Eve & That's Actually An Improvement

There are some wild New Year's Eve traditions around the world, but setting parked cars on fire in France is definitely one of the more extreme ones.

Each year, French revellers torch hundreds of parked cars (usually without permission) on New Year's Eve, but officials say the latest festivities were not nearly as lit.

This year, people only managed to burn 874 vehicles, whereas that number has topped more than 1,000 in years past.

According to reports by Euro News, the number has declined significantly from the 1,316 cars that were burned overnight during New Year's Eve in 2019.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin took to Twitter to praise police and security personnel for keeping those numbers down, thanking them for working hard to contain the fires and violence that did spring up.

"The night of New Year's Eve saw a decrease in violence thanks to the efforts of law enforcement," said the tweet. "Thank you to the nearly 130,000 police, gendarmes and civil security personnel who provided assistance and ensured the safety of the French people last night."

French officials report the number of burned cars after New Year's Eve each year, and the tally typically gets into the high hundreds or low 1,000s.

However, last year's numbers were not reported because France was in the middle of a nationwide lockdown due to the pandemic at the time.

The violent car-burning tradition goes back to at least the 1980s, according to France24. It has sometimes been used as an act of protest, and it became more of a New Year's Eve tradition in poor communities beginning in the mid-2000s.

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.