The October 17 France Protests: A Philosopher's Take

A shattered storefront forms a halo around her face, which is etched with an abysmal sadness: This woman, whose business was devastated by rioters, is speaking to a camera from Franceinfo. The cameraman overplays the symbolic image: The starburst of the shattered glass forms something like an immense white mane of hair. It could be beautiful or tragic, turning her into a saint or a martyr, but it borders on the grotesque, as if she were part of her own storefront. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The shopkeeper, however, knows: She weeps for her lost savings, her shattered life. Ironically, she has become a victim of a protest movement supposedly denouncing the high cost of living.

“We’d never seen anything like it.” Paris ransacked, looted, and set ablaze by hordes of rioters. And not just Paris: Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Limoges. Yes, Limoges, the city of porcelain… France is burning, and everyone, even the old-timers—the seasoned mayors who’ve been around the block a few times, the activists raised on tense protests, the journalists who’ve seen it all, the residents of Place de la République—agrees: “We’ve never seen anything like this.” Even Emmanuel Macron, who had just seen Céline Dion set the Plenitude Arena ablaze the night before—yes, you can’t make this stuff up—had not expected such an outburst of violence.

But what is “this,” exactly? Everyone has a theory, and understandably so: We have to try to make sense of the chaos, to distinguish between political symbolism and senseless frenzy, and understand why the city hall in Limoges went up in flames, why the one in Marseille was stormed like the Capitol on January 6, why masked men dressed in black are running around with French flags, why others loot stores, pelt police with stones, and applaud the firefighters who come to put out the fires they started.

The Insurrection as Postcard

On the stage that is the street, incompatible genres overlap. On one side, a Ken Loach film: nurses, teachers, students, Yellow Vest protesters—the France that counts what it has left at the end of the month and knows it doesn’t amount to much. On the other, an action movie somewhere between The Stronghold and Athena, mixed with a GTA-style video game: masked figures, store windows kicked in, looting, and car chases. Some march with their faces uncovered, making their distress visible as they try to build a society together; others anonymously defy the authorities and indulge in the easy thrills of stealthy theft.

But they don’t just steal sneakers, clothes, or flat-screen TVs. By producing images that are impossible to forget, by commandeering people’s attention, they also strip protesters of their only real asset: visibility. By occupying the same streets, they deprive the protesters of their narrative. Everything gets jumbled together. It’s spectacular and chaotic, like a big-budget movie without a director, where all the extras have gone mad, where a runaway AI has been given an anarchist prompt: “Show me a protest that combines all the available protest footage from the last 10 years.” It’s all there: Palestinian flags, yellow vests, even surgical masks, which we so desperately lacked during the COVID pandemic and which are now part of the essential gear of seasoned protesters, protecting against both cameras and tear gas. That’s where the chaos begins, in this collision of irreconcilable languages, where everyone claims to speak on behalf of everyone else. It’s the Republic of Babel, a sort of Netflix of social reality in multiplex form, where competing fictions play side by side in parallel worlds.

You can imagine the tourists’ dismay. They were hoping to see the lights of Paris, only to find the lights of the fires instead. They dreamed of a romantic comedy, of living out Emily in Paris, but instead they are plunged into anarchy in Paris. They wanted, like the pope, to visit the restored splendors of Notre-Dame, and instead find themselves in an immersive version of Les Misérables—one that’s a little too realistic.

That, too, is Paris: Insurrection is part of the postcard views. And Victor Hugo remains the best guide, provided you actually read him. Gavroche and the insurgents of 1832—the wretched who became rioters—were ready to die defending a particular vision of the republic against the July Monarchy and the usurper Louis-Philippe. Do the protesters of 2026 even know what they want? Playing at being the wretched is not enough to give you their greatness.

The rioters first targeted the protesters’ message: By claiming to embody and amplify it, they drowned it out

“We’d never seen anything like it…” The id, in psychoanalysis, refers to the chaotic drive that bides its time. It is always tempting to see the street as an unconscious mind laid bare, allowing the return of the repressed and its manifestation [the French word means both “manifestation” and “protest”] when the levees break. But sometimes a metaphor should remain just that. The protesters who took to the streets to share their concerns, defend their arguments, and make their somewhat hard-of-hearing representatives hear the reality of their daily lives are anything but neurotic symptoms; they are perfectly aware of what they mean, and they do not want to be reduced to the disorderly expression of anger.