From thefp.com
“C’est la Révolution, on prend la Bastille!” the protesters shouted as they broke into Marseille’s city hall in France on Saturday. It’s the Revolution. We’re taking the Bastille. Carrying a Palestinian flag, they overturned furniture and knocked a bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, to the floor. Protesters elsewhere stormed buildings across the country.
By evening, the city hall of Limoges, in west-central France, was burning. Its roof was destroyed; its century-old bell tower collapsed. In Bordeaux, in the southwest, rioters ransacked the official residence of the prefect, the national government’s local representative. More than 2,000 people were arrested; more than 600 police officers were injured. Several hundred shops were damaged across the country, according to the interior minister. By Sunday afternoon, fresh clashes had broken out in Paris. Shopkeepers were left clearing broken glass and counting their losses.
What were they supposed to have done to deserve this?
Earlier this month, I wrote in The Free Press about brewing protests in France, which began as demonstrations by high school students asking for better teachers and school conditions. Even then, there was violence. But it takes a considerable effort now to look at these scenes and see a dispute over school funding or the cost of living.
Americans appalled by the riots on January 6, 2021, will recognize the contempt for democratic institutions. A crowd decides it speaks for the people and claims the right to force its way into a public building. Those who actually work there, or were elected to serve there, become obstacles to be swept aside in pursuit of violent revolution.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, Jean-Luc Mélenchon bears a heavy political responsibility for bringing France to this point. As the leader of France Unbowed, the country’s radical-left party, he practices a strategy of “conflictualization”—putting every instance of violence into a convenient context. A dispute at a school, a police intervention, the price of fuel, Gaza: He turns each into a confrontation with the same hated system. Whatever the grievance, the government and the institutions of the French Republic stand accused.
Mélenchon has explained the thinking behind this approach, drawing on the political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. People with quite different demands, he has said, can be brought together if they come to believe they have a common adversary. Give them a “them,” and you can build an “us.” From his perspective, this means keeping people angry enough at the same enemy—the French Republic—that their disagreements with one another cease to matter.
With a presidential election a little over six months away, the attraction is obvious. Mélenchon needs to poll first or second to reach the two-candidate runoff. A debate over what he would do in office invites awkward questions about his policies, his alliances, and his record. It also leaves voters free to prefer someone else on the political left. But if he and his allies convince French voters that they are fighting an intolerable regime—or fascism—they can insist that he is the only one who can take it down. Anyone who asks an inconvenient question can be accused of helping the other side.
Those who are skeptical that this is his approach need only look at how his party has handled the school protests. On October 13, the national coordinator of Mélenchon’s party, Manuel Bompard, was asked on the radio about a local party account that had doxxed a principal for opposing the protests and the ongoing blockades of schools. Bompard said he had not seen the post and drew a distinction between criticizing a position and targeting a person. He also insisted that blockading the school was not violence. Meanwhile, a principal trying to keep his school open had been singled out by a political party. Consider what that did to his authority the next morning.
Mathilde Panot, who leads the party’s deputies in parliament, made her position clear in a message she posted on Saturday, when she combined her support for the protesters with a commemoration of a French police massacre of Algerian demonstrators on October 17, 1961. That massacre deserves remembrance. But placing it on par with current riots invites an unmistakable comparison: Today’s protesters are the heirs of yesterday’s victims, and the police facing them inherit the guilt of their predecessors. It leaves little room to consider what either side is actually doing now.
On Saturday, Mélenchon told his supporters not to participate in looting or destruction. But even in his condemnation, he sent the anger back toward the authorities, blaming the police command for opening the way to chaos and accusing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of having “played with fire.” We have heard this from him before. At the start of the 2023 unrest following the unjust police killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, he declared: “The watchdogs order us to call for calm. We call for justice.”
Responding to Mélenchon on Saturday, the prime minister said that one could not call for violence to stop while supplying excuses for those committing it. He was right. A leader who has spent years teaching his supporters to regard French institutions as their enemy cannot shed his responsibility with a few words of disapproval when those institutions come under attack.
The Palestinian flag in Marseille belongs in this story too. What, exactly, does the mayor of Marseille have to do with Gaza? How does storming his offices help a French student get a teacher?
For the activists joining these causes together, these questions barely arise. They have already decided that the causes are one. This is what intersectionality has come to mean in much of the radical left’s politics: Sort the world into oppressors and oppressed, then take sides. A French principal, a police officer, and Israel can end up in the same camp without anyone having to explain much about the similarities between them.
I find the treatment of the students particularly cynical. Their complaints are specific, and some could be addressed. They need teachers and functioning schools. Instead, they are being recruited into a struggle whose leaders have a political interest in keeping it going. An agreement that lets students return to class might be a victory for those students. It is far less useful to a politician campaigning against the whole system.
Islamist movements have their own reasons to encourage distrust of the Republic. A French government report published in 2025 described how Muslim Brotherhood networks work through religious, educational, and social organizations, and warned of efforts to replace national belonging with competing allegiances. Telling French Muslims that their country’s institutions are inherently hostile to them, as the far left has done, serves that purpose. And when that argument is couched in the language of antiracism, it carries it well beyond Islamist circles.
The young people listening to all this have already been given plenty of reasons to worry. We tell them to study for careers that artificial intelligence may eliminate, to fear war, to prepare for climate catastrophe. Adults seem increasingly unable to manage the world they are asking children to inherit. Politicians who flatter their anger can find a ready audience. They owe those children something better.
The state, meanwhile, has given people too many reasons to doubt its promises of protection. During the riots in 2023, town halls were attacked across France. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, rioters rammed a car into the mayor’s home and set it alight while his wife and children were inside. His wife and one child were injured. The mayor was at the town hall.
I cannot get past that detail. He was at work, serving his community, while his family fled an attack on their home. What is another mayor supposed to conclude from that? What does a teacher, after the Islamist murders of teachers Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard in 2020 and 2023, hear in the next official assurance that the Republic stands behind its public servants?
These were different crimes, committed in different circumstances. But the people who go on doing those jobs are left with a very practical question: If someone comes for me, will I be protected?
I have heard versions of that question throughout more than two decades of working against antisemitism in Europe. Jewish citizens are assured that France is their home, then made to answer for Israel. Even their need for protection becomes a matter of political dispute. You cannot ask people to trust institutions while forcing them to argue, again and again, that their fears deserve to be taken seriously.
This disconnect comes from the very top. In November 2023, President Emmanuel Macron chose not to attend the march against antisemitism in Paris. His prime minister was there. Two former presidents were there. But he, despite verbally condemning antisemitism and calling for unity, stayed away. Jewish citizens needed to see their president beside them.
Others watch these failures, too. A mayor sees a colleague threatened. A teacher wonders whether the next controversy will bring a mob to the school gates. People begin to make private accommodations with fear, choosing not to speak about a controversial subject, or deciding that public service is no longer worth the risk. The damage is harder to photograph than a burning building, but it lasts much longer.
Every attack gives the far right more material for its promise to restore order. Indeed, right-wing leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally will exploit all of this unrest. Mélenchon may hope that this confrontation will take him into the runoff, but he is also helping his opponents make their case that France can’t survive his victory.
On Sunday evening, Macron condemned the violence and announced a review of possible failures in intelligence and police preparations. He promised the perpetrators would be punished. I wanted to hear how his government would protect people before the next attack. There was no answer. Or maybe there was. While he was speaking, rioters were once again looting all over the country.
The government needs to protect officials and teachers, prosecute their attackers, and get schools open. It needs to investigate police abuses seriously, without accepting that those abuses justify an assault on anyone in uniform. And it needs to keep doing this after the immediate crisis has passed. People will believe the state can protect them when they see it happening, consistently, in their own lives.
I believe in the French Republic. I resent the suggestion that caring about its survival makes someone naive, or secretly authoritarian. We have the right to protest because we live in a democracy. We also have the right to go to school, to disagree with a crowd, and to elect a mayor who can do the job without fearing for his family.
Marseille’s city hall is not the Bastille. The people who broke into it were not staging a just revolution against authoritarianism; they were attacking the means by which their fellow citizens govern themselves. They seemed proud of that. I want a government that understands how serious this is—and acts before another public servant, or another family, pays the price.