A knife-wielding man stabbed several people, including children, at a park in southeastern France on Thursday, the authorities said, in an attack that President Emmanuel Macron called “absolutely cowardly.”
“Children and one adult are between life and death,” Mr. Macron said on Twitter about the attack in Annecy, a city of about 130,000 people. “The nation is in shock.”
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said on Twitter that a suspect had been arrested.
The attack occurred just before 10 a.m. at a popular lakefront park in Annecy. Anthony Le Tallec, a former professional soccer player who ended his career in the city, said he witnessed the attack. In an Instagram story from the park, where he filmed police and emergency services at the scene, he said that he had been jogging on the lakefront when he saw dozens of people running in the other direction.
“There was a mom who told me: ‘Run! Someone is stabbing everyone. He stabbed children,’” Mr. Le Tallec said.
He then moved out of the way as the assailant, being chased by the police, ran toward him, he said. The attacker rushed up to an older man nearby and stabbed him, Mr. Le Tallec said.
“It’s crazy to see this in Annecy,” he said.
A woman who said she had witnessed the attack told a local radio station that the assailant had jumped over a park fence and stabbed a small girl and a baby in a stroller. “I really thought it was a joke, but not at all,” the woman, who was not identified, told France Bleu radio. “When I heard the mother’s scream, I started to run.”
Antoine Armand, a lawmaker for the Haute-Savoie area, which includes Annecy, called the stabbing “an attack against our soul.”
France’s lower house of Parliament observed a minute of silence after news broke of the attack, briefly interrupting fiery debates among lawmakers on Mr. Macron’s pension overhaul law. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the speaker of the lower house, said the French prime minister was traveling to Annecy because of the stabbings.
Terrorist attacks have receded from the headlines in France in recent years, but the country is still on high alert, and the authorities say that the police and intelligence services regularly foil plots.
Although the motive for the stabbings on Thursday was unknown, France was struck by large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in 2015 and in 2016, followed by a string of smaller but still deadly shootings and stabbings in subsequent years, often carried out by lone assailants.
In April, Mr. Darmanin said on the BFMTV news channel that French security forces had thwarted 41 terrorist attacks since 2017, including about a dozen since 2020, and that most of them had been planned by people with radical Islamist views.
Attacks specifically targeting children are rare in France.
In 1993, a masked gunman held toddlers hostage for two days at their kindergarten in a suburb of Paris, but he ultimately released them unharmed before he was killed by police officers. And in 2012, a radical Islamist gunman went on a shooting spree in and around the southwestern city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school. The police fatally shot him several days later.