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The strategy outraged local officials, who accused the police of allowing ethnic groups to settle scores on the street.

“These are rival gangs, armed groups, that are taking justice into their own hands under the eyes of the state, with no reaction,” said Thierry Falconnet, mayor of a Dijon suburb hit by violence.

But French authorities and policing experts have defended the response as a textbook case of police restraint. No one died during the unrest. On Friday, Bernard Schmeltz, prefect in charge of the Dijon region, including police forces there, said officers faced “high-tension situations that could at any moment devolve into even more serious trouble.”

Experts say the restraint shown in the Dijon operation is one reason why police in France and elsewhere in Europe kill far fewer people than their counterparts in the U.S., even when confronted with armed suspects. The French national police and the gendarmes, which police France’s rural areas, killed a total of 26 people in 2019, according to BastaMag, a French media organization. U.S. police forces killed 1,098 people last year, according to Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks police killings. That is about eight times as many police killings as France on a per capita basis.

“There is an urgency in American policing culture in which it is seen as cowardice if you wait,” said Lawrence Sherman, director of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing in the U.K. “In Europe, there is a lot less shame in having someone run away, to catch them another day.”

Another major reason for the disparity: Restrictive gun laws mean gun ownership is unusual in most of Europe. That makes European police much less likely to use lethal force.

France’s approach to violent crime has been honed during years of tensions between police and minority residents of the working-class suburbs, or banlieues. In 2005, deadly riots shook the suburbs of Paris and spread to cities across France after two teenagers were electrocuted in an electrical substation and died as they were chased by the police.

“We know that when we draw our guns we’re accused of violence or mistakes,” said Stéphane Ragonneau, a police officer involved in the Dijon operations.

Such patience can backfire. When Islamist militants attacked the Bataclan theater in Paris in November 2015, Paris police leaders refused to allow soldiers under their command to intervene, even though they were among the first to respond. “Soldiers, do not engage,” one commander said, according to a parliamentary report. “We are not in a war zone.” The militants killed 90 people at the Bataclan, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history.

Since then, soldiers have been collaborating more closely with elite police units, but there has been no clear change of policy.

Though French police are wary of using lethal force, critics say their tactics can be brutal nevertheless. Police actions during the monthslong yellow-vest protests—such as firing tear-gas canisters and rubber bullets—left one person dead and more than 30 seriously injured. Most of those were eye injuries caused by rubber bullets.

The trouble started in Dijon on June 10 when men of North African origin beat a 19-year-old Chechen with baseball bats at a hookah lounge, said Eric Mathais, the Dijon prosecutor.

Members of the Chechen community put out calls on social media for people to rally in the city of 150,000 in the Burgundy region, known more for mustard than ethnic conflict.

Days later, Chechens from across France arrived in cars whose license-plate numbers were covered by black tape, wielding assault rifles, baseball bats and steel bars, according to police. About 100 masked men gathered in front of the hookah bar, Mr. Mathais said. Some forced their way in, ransacking it and assaulting people, injuring four seriously.

Opposition and local politicians criticized the government and the police, saying they had abandoned the city.

“Our country sinks into chaos!” said Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party. “Gangs are waging an ethnic war, automatic weapons in hand.”

Police used tear gas to break up fighting between the Chechens and North Africans at the hookah bar but were unable to make arrests, Mr. Mathais said. In the following days, the Chechens played cat-and-mouse with the authorities, officials said, gathering out of sight of the police presence to assault people who appeared to be of North African descent.

The government of President Emmanuel Macron defended its response to the incident. “Our security forces never balk when they are called upon,” said French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, adding that the police had been outnumbered by “a savage horde.”

On Saturday, Mr. Mathais, the Dijon prosecutor, said six members of the French Chechen community in several cities were detained in connection with the violence. His office brought preliminary charges of assault and destruction of property against four of the men and released the other two without charging them. France’s Chechen community numbers in the tens of thousands, many of whom are political refugees from Russia.

“The norm here is that police act with discernment,“ said Jean-Michel Fauvergue, former commander of the RAID, an elite police unit, and now a lawmaker in Mr. Macron’s party. “This is something that one has to understand about French mentality. We won’t draw our guns and shoot everyone.”