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Between mid-September and its recent apex on October 17th, tens of thousands of high school students—joined by far-left activists from presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party, radical black blocs, and young people from the “banlieues”—have engaged in intensely violent and destructive riots in France’s major cities.
The number of demonstrators has reached hundreds of thousands and 10,000 arrests have been made. Thousands of rioters and police—though mostly the latter—have been injured, sometimes seriously. About the same number of public buildings, including schools, universities, police stations, city halls, and prefectures were ransacked or burned down. Three thousand small businesses, luxury stores, and supermarkets were vandalized or looted. In Marseilles, 30,000 looters destroyed and emptied hundreds of stores in one day alone. After a wave of “shock and awe,” most of the French have turned to anger against the rioters as well as the government, and feel humiliated by the scenes that made headlines around the world.
While street demonstrations and uprisings have been part of the French political landscape since before the Revolution, their frequency and violence have intensified since Emmanuel Macron’s first election as president ten years ago. First came the spontaneous, leaderless, and non-partisan “Yellow Vests” movement that lasted for over a year in 2018 and 2019, mobilizing mostly impoverished workers and retirees from rural France. Then, in early 2023, a social demonstration by labor unions opposed the rise of the retirement age from 62 to 64.
That summer, the killing of a youngster of immigrant origin as he tried to drive away from the police triggered massive destruction of public buildings in the banlieues of large cities. Ultra-left groups such as the black blocs have violently challenged the police and caused destruction on the fringes of labor or Yellow Vests demonstrations and even at international soccer events. Young looters coming mostly from the banlieues have taken advantage of the disorder created by the black blocs.