On Saturday, the bell tower of Limoges’ beautiful 19th-century city hall collapsed in a tragic inferno. The building was ravaged by a fire officials say was set deliberately as a wave of violent disorder swept through French towns and cities. Ah oui, plus ça change.
In Marseille, intruders briefly forced their way into the city hall. Over in Bordeaux, rioters ransacked the prefect’s residence. In Paris and elsewhere, videos emerged of looters scuttling in and out of shops, sometimes in front of their distraught owners.
By Monday, some 2,400 people had been arrested and nearly 1,000 police officers and gendarmes hurt. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez offered to resign—President Emmanuel Macron refused him—while conceding: “Yes, we lost control in some major cities.”
Curfews followed that night in parts of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Nice. The prime minister described the situation as calm. But gilets-jaune organizers have already called for an "Act II" this Saturday, and unions a national strike on November 5.
It is tempting to call this yet another French riot and leave it at that. Typical protests about school conditions, the cost of living, and anger at Macron were hijacked by far-left agitators and opportunistic looters, who quite literally inflamed things. Protest is French culture.
But this destructive unrest is perhaps better understood as a ritual. For some 240 years, France has shown a singular talent for refusing the reforms it needs until crisis—revolution, bankruptcy, invasion—imposes them at ruinous cost.
A Three-Century Habit
France cannot simply reform. It must rupture, and repeatedly, to metamorphose. This is a habit that predates the Republic, itself founded in revolutionary violence that, in spirit if not in scale, would look familiar to 18th-century Jacobins in the past few days.
Louis XVI’s indulgent monarchy bankrolled America’s war of independence.
Historians put the total bill at up to 1.3 billion livres —equivalent to nearly three and a half years of the monarchy's entire annual tax revenue in 1776—largely borrowed money, because France could not overhaul a tax system riddled with exemptions for nobles and clergy.
By 1786, nearly half of royal spending went on servicing debt. When a minister proposed a land tax the privileged would also pay, an assembly of French notables balked. The crown, sliding toward bankruptcy, summoned the Estates-General. The rest is 1789.
What followed the revolution was a long-running bonfire. The Terror executed some 17,000 people, and thousands more died in prison or without trial. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia cost his army roughly 500,000 casualties, most of them to disease and cold.
Two decades of war with Britain ended at Waterloo. France, despite its earlier Napoleonic glories, lost.
Between 1789 and 1871, France cycled through three monarchies, two empires, and three republics, punctuated by revolutions in 1830 and 1848, a coup, defeat at Sedan, and the bloodbath of the Paris Commune.
When Germany declared war on France in August 1914, French generals answered their machine guns with frontal assaults, a miscalculation, to put it mildly. On August 22, some 27,000 French soldiers were killed, the deadliest day in the nation’s military history.
The interwar response was hubris, denial and delusion, all dressed up as prudence. Billions of francs went into the Maginot Line, a concrete defensive marvel that the Nazis understood to be impenetrable. So they simply drove around it.
The Germans came through the Ardennes, a forest the French high command had foolishly judged impassable to tanks and screened with several cavalry divisions that still included horse brigades.
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France fell in six weeks and endured four years of Nazi occupation, in no small part because of the self-destructive arrogance of an aging military elite in those squandered interwar years.
These days, the self-harm is mostly fiscal. The French state spends about 57 percent of national output—over seven points above the euro-area average—collects 43.6 percent in taxes and social contributions, and still ran a deficit of 5.1 percent of GDP last year.
Public debt stood at a record 119 percent of GDP at the end of June. Pensions alone absorb 14.1 percent of GDP, nearly a quarter of all public spending.
Even Macron’s modest reform raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 was suspended in December to get a budget through parliament. The labor market, and by extension the economy, is strangled by a tangled knot of union-appeasing bureaucracy.
Nor is the would-be savior offering a cure. The far-right National Rally’s Marine Le Pen, cleared by an appeals court in July to run in 2027's presidential election despite her embezzlement conviction, promises to restore retirement at 62—and at 60 for those who started work before 20.
Le Pen, favored to win the presidential election next spring, prices the plan at €9 billion a year. The Institut Montaigne, a Paris think tank, put the cost of her party’s near-identical 2024 version at €34.7 billion a year.
There is a good reason the spread between French and German government debt yields is widening, and not in Paris’s favor. Bond traders see the present and the future.
French Integration
Across the Atlantic, President Donald Trump has declared “France is burning!” and blamed immigration and Islam.
Trump is right in that integration is part of the backdrop to this current wave of chaos, though French authorities have not linked immigrants to the violence. Ministers instead blamed ultra-left militants and the looters who trailed them. Yet integration is in this story.
Those looting were largely young men from deprived suburban estates, according to a police union. These areas, the banlieues, are home to the underclass of disaffected ethnic minorities, many with roots in France’s former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa.
France has a large population of people who either themselves, or their parents or grandparents, immigrated from former colonies. Many of them are languishing at the bottom of French society, feeling discriminated against by the majority population.
But some are disaffected partly by choice, declining to relinquish their religious or cultural practices, particularly in Muslim communities, that do not conform to classic French secular ideals.
It is not a coincidence that there was a large number of Palestinian flags on display at the various demonstrations. Leftism explains some of the flags, but not all.
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France’s largest survey of immigrants and their descendants, published in May, depicts uneven integration, rather than universal failure.
Some immigrants and their descendants face poverty, unemployment, segregation, and discrimination, with educational disadvantages persisting, even among some third-generation North African families.
Hiring experiments reveal penalties linked to North African names and Muslim identity: in a large government-backed test, applicants with North African-sounding names were 31.5 percent less likely to get a callback.
Research finds enduring Muslim religiosity, associated with family transmission and social exclusion. IFOP polling reports religious conservatism and tensions over willingness to prioritize secular law, particularly among younger Muslims.
Nevertheless, language acquisition, mixed partnerships, and socioeconomic progress demonstrate integration across generations. The May survey found 94 percent of the children of two immigrant parents feel French.
Overall, the evidence suggests entrenched inequalities alongside substantial integration. Those inequalities are felt acutely during times of economic pain, as now with the energy crisis caused by wars in Ukraine and Iran.
Macron, who enjoyed a Céline Dion concert in Nanterre on Friday night as his streets were burning with rage, left on Monday for a three-day Gulf tour to secure extra diesel and oil. It is already too late.
Back to School
The current protest movement began in September with a student blockade over staff shortages at a high school in Créteil.
It spread first through the Paris suburbs, notably Seine-Saint-Denis, the mainland department with the highest share of immigrants: nearly a third of residents, the largest groups born in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Pupils complain of missing teachers and even missing desks—in the very schools meant to integrate immigrants’ children. Meanwhile, the task of integration grows. France issued 384,230 first residence permits last year, up 11 percent.
To many, such as Le Pen, this is the essence of the problem: there are far too many incomers. She wants a referendum on immigration, an end to family reunification, and the systematic expulsion of foreigners who are in France illegally or have committed crimes.
To be fair, France is hardly idle on integration. It polices laïcité, its strict secularism, with zeal: headscarves banned in public schools in 2004, face veils in public in 2010, a law against “separatism” in 2021, abayas in classrooms in 2023.
What it neglects is staffing the classrooms where integration actually happens.
This year’s budget cut more than 3,000 teaching posts. Only after weeks of blockades did the education minister promise 3,000 replacement teachers. Symbols now, structural reform never. It’s the French habit in miniature.
The Burning Hôtel de Ville
The hopeful case for France is that its ruptures do also tend to regenerate. The country humiliated in 1940 built a postwar boom and a Fifth Republic that has endured since 1958. Most of Saturday’s 550,000 marchers were peaceful, demanding a state that works for them.
Fair enough. But can France reform itself out of this period of self-destruction? Can it make the urgent, if painful, fiscal reforms? Can it get a grip on immigration and expel foreigners who hate what makes France, France? Can it fully integrate disaffected minorities?
Nothing in the past 240 years suggests it will kick the habit. The people are turning to the far-left and the far-right, as the center between them dies with Macron’s doomed presidency and ugly legacy. Both sides offer little more than profligacy and populism.
France knows how to take to the barricades, how to storm a building, how to dance angrily in front of a pyre in the road. But its leaders have never learned how to repair the hôtel de ville before it burns. This is just the last riot before the next one.