More than 600 anti-government rioters were arrested in Paris, many of them armed with weapons such as hammers and metal petanque balls, and another 400 across France. Shops in the centre of the city had been boarded up and museums and tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower closed as more than 10,000 people took to the streets.
Yellow Vest protesters played a cat-and-mouse game with officers, moving from the Champs-Elysees area where many luxury shops were looted last Saturday, to other parts of the city, setting cars and bins alight.
Armed police vehicles were seen crashing through makeshift barricades around upmarket Boulevard Haussmann, where supermarkets were looted and cars set on fire.
In all, 125,000 people demonstrated across France as 89,000 police were deployed to maintain order.
Similar protests spread to Belgium and the Netherlands.
In Brussels more than 400 of the 1,000 protesters were arrested.
But there was less violence in France than last Saturday.
The Yellow Vest protests, named after the hi-vis vests motorists must keep in their cars, were initially a demonstration against a proposed fuel tax hike but have since turned into a campaign against the Emmanuel Macron government and falling living standards.
In a bid to defuse the chaos, embattled Prime Minister Edouard Philippe last week postponed the fuel tax increases for six months.