PARIS — Clouds of tear gas covered a major square in southern Paris on Saturday as the police attempted to quell a “Yellow Vest” demonstration marking the movement’s anniversary.

Protesters, some masked, threw paving stones and set trash cans on fire, while dozens of other demonstrators, a few wearing the yellow road-emergency vests that became the movement’s uniform, milled about on the Place d’Italie at the capital’s southeastern edge.

But the mayhem was largely confined to a small area and could not hide the relatively weak mobilization on Saturday. Some 4,700 people demonstrated in Paris, officials said, and 28,000 across the country, compared with the hundreds of thousands who turned out at the movement’s inception last November.

Then, nearly 300,000 turned out for what began as apparently spontaneous demonstrations against a proposed fuel tax rise but quickly broadened into a major social protest movement that rocked the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.