A New French Revolution

W hat is at present being enacted on our laptops, websites, and television screens is another French Revolution. It is possible — indeed, greatly to be desired — that this revolution will be contained, halted, and reversed, but that possibility seems remote at the moment. Rather, the contagion is spreading throughout France with minimal resistance from the authorities and currently leaping over borders to northern Italian cities and with almost identical slogans — Gaza! No longer an actual place but a Myth — that have little to do with either French or Italian life or serious politics.

This current Revolution also borrows from terrorism the doctrine of recognizing none of the usual distinctions between innocent and guilty, participant and bystander, soldier and civilian, foreign and domestic. Anyone who is not tearing down French institutions or is self-evidently prosperous or merely respectable is suspect and thus deserving of brutal punishment, not excluding rape. Such terrible confusions often happen in revolution as in war. But this Revolution has introduced some new and significant distinctions in its fragile and temporary blend of Islamo-Gauchisme — Muslim-owned stores are protected by some rioters and their advisors.

And because of technical advances in communications, almost every revolutionary moment — every building burnt, every bourgeois hauled from his car and stripped, every mob storming a police station, every fashion emporium or mom-and-pop shop looted — is being broadcast to the world. If or when the authorities seek to restore some semblance of order, their repression will be broadcast, too. But there will be this difference: Every revolutionary outrage will encourage the criminals and activists to greater efforts; every police overreaction will shame the authorities and be cited as an argument for “dialogue’’ and “restraint’’ by the one-eyed media.

There are no justifications for this upsurge of violent rebellion, of course — merely angry grievances by groups of discontented people, mainly young, many from immigrant backgrounds (even if born in France), all persuaded that they are either oppressed or uniquely sensitive to the plight of the oppressed, and protected by their ignorance and illiteracy from reality.

If there are no justifications, though, there are causes. Take, for instance, the original cause of their rebellion. Students stormed out of their schools complaining of poor conditions that required more expenditure. Doubtless there are some poor conditions. But why is that? Students and their communities could help to repair those conditions, but they think that is the job of the state. And it is. France spends massively on public schools as on everything else. Public spending amounts to 57 percent of the country’s GDP — among the highest rates in the European Union — but conditions are poor throughout the public sector as in all socialist societies which encourage demands but fail to reward responsibility. In schools and colleges, those low standards increasingly include the ideology that no one shall fail and all shall have prizes. The result is, as the distinguished philosopher Chantal Delsol writes in her commentary on the coming French presidential election: “Thus, in France today an immense group of illiterates is produced, wedded to screens, ignorant of spelling and deprived of a vocabulary.’’

They do not, however, emerge without opinions. Quite the contrary: They emerge from their socialist experience with an ultra-progressive ideology of extreme egalitarianism, anti-capitalism, and cultural hostility to France and its historical institutions and identity. That might almost be a blend of European socialism and American woke-ism and thus one step towards the internationalizing of the students’ ideology in a way that never happened (or happened much later) to the original Sixty-Eighters who failed to topple de Gaulle. On graduation, they then gravitate to the parties of the Far Left, notably La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon, as activists and in due course as its leaders. Not surprisingly, it was this group that immediately joined the students and helped to broaden their cause into a wider rebellion with larger aims, a more organized base of support, and a more dangerous ideology.

Because Melenchon’s party has long embraced France’s Islamists as a key faction in the “New France’’ coalition he believes to be a potential electoral majority next time, that brought a much more significant ally into the Revolution. Mass immigration by Third World migrants has imported into France new ethnic and religious communities whose cultural loyalties clash with national traditions and undermine the sense of national community that makes democracy possible. Without that, as Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, all politics becomes about race and religion. Whether he realizes it or not — and he must because it seems to be his actual strategy — Melenchon has now tapped into what is now a global leftist ideology that is less a rival than a synthesis of all other leftist causes. As the Hudson Institute scholar Zineb Riboua pointed out on X:

The contemporary Left is being absorbed by a new wave of Third-Worldism that treats anti-Israel politics as the core axis of moral meaning. Gaza has become the central symbol because it fuses every theme the activist Left needs: victimhood, colonial injustice, racial hierarchy, and global resistance. This is why figures like Greta Thunberg shifted from climate justice to Gaza without hesitation. Climate politics offered urgency but not a revolutionary antagonist. Gaza provides both.

The result is a Revolution which, in addition to its other roots in French society, has the support of a major political party, a global ideology that resonates worldwide, a much more divided society than de Gaulle faced in 1968 when its divisions were rooted in class rather than race or religion, and finally, numerous unsolved economic crises. To put it simply, the French state is running out of money. Its debts amount to more than 120 percent of annual GDP; it is paying higher rates of interest on that debt than is Italy; and its working citizens are already highly taxed. France can’t buy itself out of these problems. And the country is a long way from thinking itself out of them.

The parties of the right in France and other European countries cannot escape responsibility for these problems. When they were in office, they pursued many of the same policies, and in opposition they failed to oppose or even analyze them vigorously. When “populist’’ conservatives arose to champion their old causes, they joined with the left in grand coalitions to keep them out of power all costs. What will they do now to confront this growing disorder which has the potential to overthrow democracy and even to evolve into civil war? That’s an urgent question an election is due early next year and until then one of the main threats to the French Republic is the weak political leadership of President Macron. To quote an editorial in Le Figaro:

If the far left, criminals, and looters can turn France completely upside down within a few hours, it is above all because a self-intoxicated technocratic monarchy has systematically leveled all the moral, security-related, cultural, and economic safeguards that hold a society together.  Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s useful idiots do not just wear the kufiya, but also the necktie.

Thus conservatives in other French parties should be prepared to work both with the president in dealing with the immediate crisis, and with Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblemant National in shaping solutions to the deeper crises of France and its great but wounded civilization. For the moment, what France needs is the restoration of order by civilized methods that will probably have to include calling in the army. Allowing the barbarism in the streets to spread would mean more and worse.