Congress remains out of session until after the November midterm elections, and lawmakers will return to a busy lame-duck agenda.
This week, we’re looking across the Atlantic at what the BBC described as “some of the worst scenes of public disorder in modern French history.” It is a stark warning for Americans.
From the Schools to the Streets
Last month, in a working-class Paris suburb, teachers went on strike and students blockaded their school over teacher shortages and overcrowded classrooms.
Within weeks, the protests spread to hundreds of schools across the country, and La France Insoumise—France’s hard-left party—took up the cause.
The protests escalated as the French left poured into the streets: union members, climate activists, students, Palestinian sympathizers, and self-proclaimed “antifascist” groups. On October 17 alone, the Interior Ministry counted more than half a million marchers nationwide.
Then the black bloc went to work.
Americans may remember the left’s “black bloc” from the riots of 2020. They’re the black-clad, professional agitators and anarchists who infiltrate demonstrations to cause mayhem. In France, they’re often called “casseurs” (literally “breakers”). French police arrested over 2,000 of them over the weekend.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said rioters, “several hundred, sometimes several thousands depending on the location,” formed “at the very clear instigation of the ultra-left.” These black bloc militants, he said, then “pulled along a number of radicalized young people.” Violence and looting followed.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that “seditious, ultra-left groups were behind the riots,” and their aim was “to bring down the republic.”
The list of damages from the weekend reads like a report from a war zone. A historic city hall in Limoges was set afire, and its roof and clock tower collapsed—what officials called “a catastrophe for heritage.”
In Lille, rioters broke into the city hall. In Bordeaux, they ransacked the local prefect’s residence. In Lyon, they torched a tourism office. Official estimates say thousands of businesses have been damaged or looted. And the unrest shows no signs of slowing down.
“A Society That Undoes Its Bonds”
The roots of today’s unrest go back decades to the student protests that paralyzed France in May 1968 and created the cultural weakness that led to this lawlessness. In fact, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent argued that 1968 was a turning point for the country:
“After May ’68 we became a society that undoes its bonds.” The citizen who acted for his country, Manent wrote, gave way to “the individual of enjoyment.” Every rule binding the French together came to look “useless and arbitrary.”
Now, nearly sixty years later, the children of the 1968 revolution run the French state, and it shows. A government that spent decades teaching its people that the nation was nothing special now can’t explain to its own young people why they should defend it.
This is why France is now helpless against the millions of Muslim, third-world migrants and refugees that French leaders have imported, and who quickly joined the rioting and looting.
Jordan Bardella, president of the right-of-center National Rally, said, “we have to stop immigration.” “A large part of the looters,” he said, “do not feel French” and are recent refugees or second or even third-generation immigrants who never assimilated.
By importing millions of foreigners, Europe’s elites sacrificed their own people and national identities at the altar of leftist values as a penance for perceived historical sins.
Here’s what Vice President JD Vance said over the weekend: “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
He’s right. For decades, governments in Paris and across Western Europe have let migrants pour in, many from the Islamic world, as if there were some moral obligation to allow mass migration. Assimilation has become optional. Europe is now seeing what happens when huge swaths of your population feel no loyalty to the nation.
Manent saw this coming a decade ago. Islam, he wrote, “has sprung up in a Europe that has dismantled its ancient parapets, or has let them crumble.”
Mike Howell of the Oversight Project (a friend of CPI) diagnoses the problem bluntly:
“This is a long, well thought out program. In Islam, they think in century-long timelines. We think in political cycles. They’ve reached critical mass, and now they’re showing it. The French don’t have the spine to deal with it… That has been the plan.”
In the Shadows of Greatness
With presidential elections in April, the French can still correct course.
Europe is the birthplace of Western Civilization. For more than a thousand years, they’ve kept the barbarians at the gates while America’s forefathers took the ideas of Western Civilization and spread liberty, prosperity, and technological advancement across the globe.
This is the inheritance of Europeans. They walk each day in the shadows of their own greatness—past memorials to Saint Denis and Joan of Arc, works of wonder like Notre-Dame Cathedral, and monuments like the Arc de Triomphe. A towering greatness surrounds them. Yet, for decades, they have walked with their heads down.
The question the French—and all men and women of the West—must ask is whether it’s time to look up and reclaim the greatness of their inheritance. Or continue to look down as their society falls into barbarism and decay.
ICYMI…
- The FBI arrested a 17-year-old in Texas for planning to assassinate Rep. Keith Self (R-TX), a Member of the House Freedom Caucus and the cofounder of the “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” which opposes radical Islamists in the U.S.
- Read in Semafor about how American Moment is training the next generation of conservative warriors: How a MAGA Youth Movement is Training “10,000 Stephen Millers”
- See Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin admit to weaponizing investigations against conservative staffers: The Democrat Party Platform Is Throwing Conservatives In Prison And Slotkin Just Said It Out Loud