AKIPRESS.COM - Police fired teargas and charged at demonstrators in central Paris as hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country staged a show of force against the government’s controversial pension reform plans, The Guardian reports.

The violence erupted at Place de la Nation, one of Paris’s biggest squares, as riot police attempted to disperse protesters. Police said they had charged after coming under a hail of paving stones and missiles. There were 27 arrests by late afternoon.

French authorities said there were 615,000 protesters on the streets across France on Tuesday, compared with 806,000 on 5 December, the first major day of action against the controversial reforms. The unions suggested the final figure was likely to be nearer to 1 million people.

As a prelude to the day of action, employees at France’s electricity grid operator, RTE, deliberately cut supplies to tens of thousands of homes in the south-west of the country on Monday evening.

As many as 50,000 homes in the Gironde area were reportedly briefly left in the dark. Afterwards, staff reportedly cut off about 37,000 properties in Lyon.