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 the New Year of 2019.

French Interior Minister Darmanin took to Twitter to praise police and security for keeping those numbers down, and he thanked 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 police," said the tweet. "Thank you to the nearly 130,000 police, gendarmes and civil security personnel who helped and ensured the safety of the French 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, there was no data on burned cars last year because France was in the middle of a nation-wide 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, but it became more of a New Year's tradition in poor communities beginning in the mid-2000s.