A 50-year-old man taking part in nationwide protests against rising fuel prices in France died on Saturday after he was hit by a car that accelerated through a human roadblock in the country's southeast, interior minister Christophe Castaner said.

Castaner said a woman taking her child for medical attention panicked when protesters at the roadblock in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, located some 70 km southeast of Lyon, began striking her car. "People hit her car, the driver panicked and she accelerated," the minister told the press. She was arrested in a state of shock, he added.