474 including 183 minors detained on suspicious of arson. 70% of those arrested were suspected of deliberately starting fires and the rest of doing so accidentally.

Some might be innocent, but I don’t think we’ll learn how many.

I just remember that France has different legal procedures (than the little stuff I know about Germany’s procedures) and it’s easier to arrest people and keep them detained. Would be interesting to know what counts as accidental and what as deliberate. Smoking, starting a campfire, burning weeds in your garden, despite the warnings - idiots are everywhere and they will do this because they don’t expect things to go wrong - or very, very wrong. “Minors” might do it just because - like we have minors throwing stones or other heavy things from motorway bridges. And minors and young adults have a tendency to do stupid stuff when they’re with a group of friends. Let there be a group of five people for one incident and you’ll have 5 arrests. Then there will be people who think it’s a clever idea to use the current situation to cash in on insurance, get rid of a building that they weren’t allowed to tear down, burn areas that are protected but could be used so much better when you “develop” them for housing or industrial buildings… And there might be an actual pyromaniac or two among them and inspired copycats.

Edit: And “having started” doesn’t necessarily mean that every fire started was successful or huge.

Headline says they were arrested on suspicion of arson. That doesn’t mean 500 committed arson. It means they suspect some are involved. Arresting all of them sounds a bit heavy handed but what can you do for something this serious?

This comes merely from headlines I’ve read, but they could have deliberately set the fires to make money on prediction markets.

To be clear, I’m not even sure what prediction markets are, as I only read the headline.