Mayhem in France as violent rioting spreads

What happened

As the most destructive riots in modern French history engulfed the country last week, France ordered troops into the streets and imposed curfews in multiple cities. Shattered glass littered sidewalks after rioters smashed and looted thousands of shops, torched cars and buildings, and attacked police, who fired tear gas and water cannons. The protests began in September as student demonstrations over underfunded, understaffed schools, but they soon mushroomed into a larger, less coherent outpouring of rage involving at least half a million protesters. In Limoges, the clock tower of the 19th-century city hall collapsed in flames; masked vandals broke into Marseille’s city hall and toppled the statue of Marianne, the national symbol; and Paris’ iconic Monument to the Republic was damaged. Over the weeks of demonstrations, at least 1,250 people have been injured — the majority police — and more than 7,000 have been arrested. President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged some “legitimate demands” but vowed that “those who destroyed must pay.”

The unrest soon spread across Europe, where nearly every capital saw protests, some of them violent. In Belgium, buildings, monuments, and public facilities were damaged. Italy sent 500 soldiers to combat looting and arson in Milan, where most of the hundreds arrested were teens. Ongoing demonstrations over the housing shortage swelled in Spain and Portugal, where students set up tent camps in city squares. In Albania, where anger over development in a nature preserve has spawned an antigovernment movement, protesters hurled Molotov cocktails. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance sought to tie the riots to the upcoming midterms. “If you want to see what is at stake in this election,” Trump said, “just look at what’s happening in France.” Vance shared a post of the burning Limoges tower with the comment “This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”

What the columnists said

France is no stranger to protests, said Nora Bussigny in The Free Press, but these “civil-war-like scenes” are new and horrifying. Law-abiding citizens are “traumatized.” One young Parisian mother told me that when she warned the rioters ransacking a café outside her window not to sully their cause by looting, they shouted, “You bourgeois bitch, we’re going to rape you!” Then they tried to break into her apartment.

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These are not “mere schoolchildren,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. “Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated” the “civilizational cancer” of antisemitism, and it’s a radical and violent strain. Rioters in Paris burst into Ohaley Yaakov synagogue, “scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents.” It’s not that this was an explicitly anti-Jewish protest. But the protesters in France, as in the U.S., have adopted the Palestinian flag as a catchall symbol of oppression, and violence as their strategy. When will we “wake up to the West’s peril?”

These riots had many causes, said Sylvie Kauffmann in the Financial Times. The country “is adrift, politically, fiscally, and socially,” and its political class is only making things worse. Farleft party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed has “tried to capitalize on the chaos,” openly sympathizing with the protesters and even joining protests last weekend. The “main beneficiary,” though, is likely Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party wants to expel migrants; she is now favored to win the presidency next April.

The postwar French social compact was “never really tenable,” said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. American progressives have often gazed longingly at France’s “sacrosanct social benefits,” which include universal health care, cheap tuition, and retirement at age 62. But funding all that is insanely expensive. Government spending now makes up “a whopping 57%” of France’s GDP. Nearly a third of its education budget is eaten up by pensions, so its poorer schools are crumbling. Debt outpaces GDP altogether. It’s not surprising that these “policies of national self-impoverishment have broader effects on social cohesion and national security.” Young talent is fleeing, and those who remain are rioting in the streets and fighting one another for dwindling resources.

“It’s not only France that’s feeling the heat,” said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Most Western countries are aging and feeling the sting of inflation, especially in ballooning housing costs. That’s why affordability is the main question in the French election next year as well as in the U.S. midterms. What’s missing from the politicians “is honesty on the reforms that are needed — both from politicians and the aging electorates that are blocking inescapable change.”