Chaos took hold of France this past weekend, as rioters stormed the streets, smashed buildings, set cars and a city hall in Limoges on fire, and looted stores across the country. It was the violent explosion of a protest movement that began in late September, with high school students angry about poor school conditions and a teacher shortage, and ended on the morning of October 18, with the streets covered in charred cars and broken glass.
You might think that Saturday’s chaos was orchestrated by the same students who started the protests. But you would be wrong. The October 17 protests—and the ones planned for this coming weekend—were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists. They share a precise project: the rejection of France’s democratic institutions, and a desire to destabilize those institutions and cause the Republic to topple.
This coalition may sound familiar to readers across the West. The red-green alliance—the convergence of radical leftists with political Islamists, brought together by their shared opposition to Western values and institutions—has become increasingly difficult to ignore, rearing its head from England to Germany to college campuses across the U.S. In other words, what we are seeing in France is only a symptom of a much larger problem. It must be identified and called out for what it is.
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To do that, we need only trace the messages and images these French groups have posted publicly over the past few weeks. For example: The day before October 17, the radical-left news site Contre Attaque published the precise addresses of several French newsrooms, which it then circulated to its more than 400,000 Instagram followers. Included on the list were right-wing outlets as well as public broadcasting sources. “On October 17, what if the channels of enemy propaganda were unplugged?” the activist news site suggested. It even offered advice: “In the capital, it’s extremely simple: The headquarters of almost all media outlets are concentrated in a few streets in the same neighborhood; they are accessible, and vulnerable.” At 7 a.m. on October 17, the order took effect: Around a hundred people—“hooded,” according to police—stormed the headquarters of CNews, one of the outlets on the list.