France’s Riots Are a Warning for the West

The country’s unrest marks the passing of a long-held illusion.

By Nathan Pinkoski and Éric Zemmour

France is no stranger to protests that degenerate into violence, but for years, pundits have offered a ready narrative to explain them.

Student demonstrations are provoked by budget cuts to education, they say. Economists connect protests in the poor banlieues of France’s big cities to economic inequality and state failure. Historians draw intricate analogies to May 1968 or to the French tradition of “Jacquerie,” the centuries-old peasant revolts against the ruling class.

This narrative is reassuring. It roots riots in material questions, all the easier to provide prepackaged material solutions. It offers politicians a ready template during election season: vow to hire more school staff and build more glitzy community centers in the banlieues. Police are ordered to let the street protests take place, only intervening when the protesters go home and professional agitators arrive to stir up trouble, then step aside to let the politicians take the limelight with their flashy promises. Protests are just the French national hobby. There is nothing new under the sun.

The events in France since September should shatter that narrative once and for all. These riots are different from those that have afflicted France in the past, exposing civilizational fractures within the country that threaten her very survival. And they reveal the status of our cold civil war, where only one side is allowed to fight.

“Attack All the Police Stations”

In September, as the new school year began, high school teachers in one poor banlieue on the outskirts of southeast Paris planned a strike to demonstrate against staffing shortages. They began on Sept. 17, and the next day their students began joining in. According to the familiar narrative, this is how these protests are supposed to work. After the students join in, other unions around the city and country offer expressions of solidarity and may strike in support. The government may or may not pledge more funds. After a few days, everyone goes back to school and work. Life carries on as before.

But this time, the protests veered off in a different direction. As they spread to the rest of the country, they rapidly became violent. Protesters assaulted teachers. In Marseille, they chased firefighters from their trucks and then set the trucks on fire. In Nantes, they destroyed a school’s main hall, one of over 100 schools damaged.

Building on their momentum, protest organizers mobilized over half a million for a nationwide rally scheduled for mid-October. As police were overwhelmed over the weekend of Oct. 17 and 18, thousands of stores and banks were hit. Damage estimates exceed €1 billion. Almost 1,000 policemen were injured and roughly 2,400 arrests were made, with adults comprising over 70% of those arrested. Unrest has continued in France ever since. Over the weekend of Oct. 24–25, clashes between police and protesters led to another 1,500 arrests. The first weekend of November saw smaller protests, bringing out a few hundred thousand, but vandals hurled bricks and Molotov cocktails at the police. National strikes, called on Nov. 5, brought 600,000 into the streets across France and more scuffles with the police. Similar protests have spread elsewhere in Europe.

While not the longest-lasting riots in recent French history, this has been the most intense episode of urban violence in memory, revealing grave weaknesses in state capacity. The French government told businesses to contract private security rather than expect the police to protect them. The sale of self-defense weapons such as pepper spray and tear gas skyrocketed. With people no longer confident that the police will respond to distress calls and protect them, the social contract of the Fifth Republic has been broken.

According to the French intelligence agencies, the protests were initiated by the La France Insoumise (LFI) political party. Launched in 2016, in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party and Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly successful Democratic primary campaign in the U.S., the LFI initially channeled the spirit of the old Left, capitalizing on public disgust over the financial crisis to advocate for social democracy. But like most Left-wing parties in the West, it has undergone an ideological shift. Abandoning the old Left’s focus on economic sovereignty a few years after it was founded, the LFI has become more pro-migrant, more focused on antiracism, and more revolutionary.

In 2026, the LFI candidate Bally Bagayoko, the Muslim son of immigrants from Mali, was elected as the mayor of Saint-Denis. A banlieue on the northern outskirts of Paris, Saint-Denis is where the kings of France are buried. Once a French working-class district, it is now majority Arab and African. Shortly after the protests began, Bagayoko was filmed dancing alongside students who had lit a garbage bin on fire in front of the gates of one school. “Violence can be legitimate at a certain point,” he told protesters.

Such rhetoric has become typical of the LFI. “We’re going to attack all the police stations in the country,” the former LFI staffer Ritchy Thibault told students in Saint-Denis. In February 2026, LFI parliamentary assistant Jacques-Élie Favrot was charged with complicity in beating a Right-wing activist to death during a protest. Elsewhere, elected representatives from the LFI (encouraged by the party’s leadership), intervened in police action against the rioters, citing the threat of police brutality. Others appeared alongside protesters waving Palestinian and Algerian flags.

As the Ministry of Justice confirmed, arrested rioters were a mixture of French citizens, second- or third-generation immigrants, and legal and illegal immigrants (France admits roughly half a million migrants per year).

“The New France”

The alliance between the hard Left and the immigrant-heavy banlieues has been kindling for some time. It began in the 1960s, during the last years of Algérie française, when the country narrowly avoided a full-blown civil war. Those years saw a sea change in the French Left, as Marxist analysis on class struggle and working-class solidarity became less fashionable. In the place of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the Left took up Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), published in 1961 with a preface by the celebrity philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The French Left recast itself as a movement dedicated to waging war against the European oppressor on behalf of the oppressed—Algerians, Africans, and otherwise. “Violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted,” wrote Sartre.

Contemporary protesters see themselves as participants in one long struggle that dates to that era. Protesters linked the Oct. 17 protest to the 65^th anniversary of the Oct. 17, 1961 confrontation between French police and Algerian protesters in Paris, when Algerians took to the streets in defiance of an edict banning such protests. Police used violence to break up the protests, killing anywhere between dozens and hundreds of Algerians (historians still dispute the exact number). This canonical event in the lore of the postcolonial Left casts the French state—and her police—as a symbol of racist, authoritarian oppression. For the contemporary Left, economic issues are a front for settling old scores with the European colonizers.

In parts of France, Northern and Western Africans have constructed a parallel culture, with its own customs, norms, and grievances. The culture is held together by an Islamic identity that demarcates itself from French identity. For this reason, it is vulnerable to Muslim Brotherhood entryism, as a 2025 intelligence report documented. It is also perfectly poised to embrace the postcolonial Left’s canon.

Since the 1970s, three major political changes have worsened the problems posed by mass immigration. French elites have long been aware that newer immigrants were not assimilating into France as prior generations had. Their response, documented in Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, was to soften the demands of assimilation. They substituted the old requirement—making the French national story one’s own, to the point of giving your children French first names—with softer, weaker demands. In 1993, the requirement of French first names was dropped. “Assimilation” was replaced by “integration”—merely following French law.

The second change was to edit the French national story to make it more multicultural. The curriculum discussed other cultures, but it really focused on the alleged wickedness of France toward those other cultures: the evils of the French empire, the slave trade, and so on. Streets and schools were renamed after the heroes of the immigrants. But the mobs care little for that. The destroyed school in Nantes was named after Nelson Mandela.

The third change came from the coup d’état of the judges. French and European courts have paralyzed the state’s efforts to restrict immigration. Since the 1980s, the French Constitutional Council has hindered the state’s capacity to establish efficient border controls. Starting in the 1990s, many European Court of Human Rights decisions have blocked the deportation of illegal immigrants, even when they are identified by the French state and ordered to leave. France now has a sizable population of such people. According to a 2025 National Assembly report, 90% of formal deportation orders (obligation de quitter le territoire français) go unfulfilled. The French government simply finds it too legally onerous to pursue these deportations.

Still, mass migration alone is not responsible. A Fox News investigation found that at least 101 groups across nine countries, including the U.S., have helped organize and amplify the protests. Only one-third of these are student organizations, while the rest are affiliated with unions, Antifa, and Palestinian organizations. Right-leaning commentators enjoy pointing out the contradictions between Islamic activists and the progressive Left, on gay and women’s rights for instance. But the ideological engine underwriting this alliance is strong: It is fueled by hatred of France and of the West.

The LFI’s function is to give this alliance the veneer of legitimacy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the LFI, declared in January 2026 that he campaigns for “the new France, the France of the great replacement, the France of the generation that replaces the other because it has been like this since the dawn of time.” Unlike a nation’s traditional intergenerational compact, Mélenchon and the LFI celebrate the transition from a native French population to one dominated by immigrant populations who will achieve the revolution that the white working classes failed to deliver.

Mélenchon represents a recurring leitmotif in the history of France: the leader of the “parti de l’étranger,” the Frenchman who sides with the invader against other French people. There’s Bishop Cauchon, who betrayed Joan of Arc to the English. There are the emigré aristocrats who worked with the English to bring down Napoleon. And then there’s Vichy France’s Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War.

Mélenchon’s strategy has been working. In the first round of the 2022 presidential elections, he received 61% of the vote of Saint-Denis—a 17-point increase from 2017, when he was still campaigning as a traditional French Leftist. In 2022, he also received 69% of the Muslim vote nationwide. Mélenchon knows where to find the votes—and what he needs to say to get them. In polls for the 2027 presidential elections, he comes in second place.

State Failure

Police lost control of France’s largest cities over the weekend of Oct. 17–18, and it’s not hard to see why. France’s national and municipal police together number roughly 180,000. The gendarmerie—a second national police force that is a branch of the French military—number around 100,000 (the regular army, should it ever need to be called to assist, numbers a similar amount). According to the Ministry of the Interior, there were 550,000 protesters nationwide on Oct. 17. Paris alone had 110,000; Marseille had 30,000, of which 8,000 were identified as rioters and looters. These numbers stretch the police force to breaking point.

Proactive strategies are required to minimize destruction and deter violence. Contrast the failure of Oct. 17–18 with the success of Oct. 24–25, when a strong show of force did a better job at containing the riots.

In the postwar era, the French Fourth Republic developed a special riot police organization—the CRS—to suppress violent protests without having to call in the army as prior Republics had done. Continued under the Fifth Republic after 1958, CRS tactics for handling riots sometimes involved the use of force or threat to use force. That changed in 1986, when Malik Oussekine, a French student of Algerian descent, was beaten to death by police after passing a protest. The event provoked an overhaul in French policing techniques and, since then, French police have generally stood off during riots to avoid risking similar incidents or creating a martyr who might fuel further violence.

That strategy works when riots are relatively small and confined. But over the years, they’ve gotten larger. The 2005 riots in France’s banlieues are still the longest in modern French history. The Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, made it clear he would have done more to stop the damage if the president and his political enemy Jacques Chirac had let him take the gloves off. Public frustration with the extent of the damage helped secure Sarkozy’s election to the presidency in 2007.

The 2005 riots should have buried the conceit of the old economic narrative. The riots began in Clichy-sous-Bois (a town close to Saint-Denis) on Oct. 27 after two adolescents of North African origin ran into a power station to hide from police and were electrocuted. At first, the riots remained local. But then on Oct. 30, police handling the riots fired a tear gas grenade that fell in front of a mosque in Clichy. This incident transformed the local riots into national ones, as other immigrant-origin populations in the banlieues took to the streets to avenge this insult. The riots lasted for three weeks, leaving over 10,000 vehicles burned, 300 buildings damaged or destroyed, and over 200 policemen injured.

But after he was elected president, Sarkozy failed to take preventive action. He and his successors hastened along the suicide of France, falling victim to the old lie that poverty causes riots. A little more money thrown into the banlieues, a few more subsidies to an ostensibly moderate Islam, would make the threat of violence go away. And in an increasingly cash-strapped French state, that meant devoting fewer resources to the forces of order.

Americans take for granted that their police will have ammunition stockpiles, tear gas, and stun grenades, but this is not the case in France. Perhaps the most shocking image from this year’s riots emerged from Limoges on Oct. 17. Anarchists burned the city’s nineteenth-century town hall to the ground while mobs shrieked in delight. That happened because the police defending the town hall ran out of munitions by midafternoon, allowing the rioters to assault the building.

During a state of emergency, French constitutional provisions allow for the detention and search of agitators for weapons and other material. Since professional agitators are often already on watch lists, this tool could be useful in removing the most dangerous elements from the streets. But the government lacks either the will or the means to do so.

It’s no surprise, then, that Frenchmen are losing confidence in their state’s capacity to protect them. Its monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence has been called into question. The French state is one of the most Hobbesian in the world: The French accept a centralized state to hold their fractious people together. General Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic constructed a strong state as a force for order, which prior republics had failed to achieve. That has been the basis of the French social contract for over half a century, but it is now coming apart. France is haunted by the specter of a return to the state of nature.

The New Social Question

Much more needs to be done to provide police with the tools to act, to stop judges from issuing lenient sentences to rioters, to deport those who threaten the welfare of the country, and to deter future rioters. Restoring respect for the law—and fear of the penalty for breaking it—is the first part of the solution.

But policing and policy matters should not make us lose sight of the broader transformation that is taking place. The victory of populist movements in Great Britain and the United States in 2016 was attributed to economic concerns, with the working class revolting against the financialized bourgeoisie, labor against capital, David Goodhart’s “somewheres” against the “anywheres.”

That narrative is no longer adequate to explain the situation in France and in the West.

Decades of mass immigration have changed our society and complicated the simpler conflicts of the past. With hundreds of thousands arriving every year in the largest Western countries, the scale of labor mobility has produced a volatile, liquid society. It is not stable enough to serve as the foundation for a new kind of class solidarity. Many immigrants carry their own cultural and civilizational loyalties which matter more than class allegiance. Next to the “somewheres” and “anywheres,” we now have “elsewheres.”

The French experience shows what we in the West miss when we frame our conflicts and protests in terms of purely material questions. We deny the destabilizing power the loyalties of the “elsewheres” bring.

“True exile is not being torn from one’s country,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Edgar Quinet, “it is living there and finding nothing left that made one love it.”

Liquid labor has created cultural challenges, turning identity into the new social question. We cannot reconstruct working-class solidarity and hold on to what we love about our communities and countries until we have brought an end to the world of liquid labor.

In France, the struggle for our identity is splitting the country. On one side is the France that wants to stay French and restore the Fifth Republic as it was originally designed by de Gaulle. On the other is the France of Mélenchon’s great replacement: a generation that waves foreign flags against the French nation and embraces hard Left ideology, envisioning the native French population reduced to a subservient minority.

Americans and other Westerners are now participants in the same drama. They face the same civilizational conflict that pits their way of life against a revolutionary force determined to destroy it. France, as so often in her history, finds herself both a forerunner of broader trends and a foot soldier on the front lines of the battlefield. Her present-day struggles warn us of what’s to come for the rest of the West. We should hope dearly for her victory.

Nathan Pinkoski is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Éric Zemmour is an essayist, French politician, and the president of the political party Reconquête. His most recent book, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Great Nation, is available from Encounter Books.