The country reminds us that things could always get worse.
The schools of France are currently in flames, with the nation several days into a national bout of student rioting: From the quasi-Belgian northern hub of Lille to the banlieus of Paris to the streets of Marseille, schools are burning, as high school students across the nation have blockaded and rampaged against their schools and anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire. I know what you’re thinking: Student rioting? In France of all places? The deuce you say!
But there are significantly darker undertones this time. The rioting has only escalated in the last two days. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an emergency meeting of the French cabinet and declared a national crisis — far too late, in the opinion of many. The immediate flashpoint for the rioting is still hazy — it seems to have spread via social media, quelle surprise — but the media is universally reporting it as an oh-so-French rebellion by “the kids” against having to work too hard at school. Per The Guardian:
There were also confrontations between children and police in Bordeaux, Rennes and Nantes in western France, and Marseille in the south. At the Lamartine lycée, in the north of Paris, students waved placards complaining they had exhausting timetables. One read: “8am-6pm. More hours of lessons than sleep.”
In the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, mayor Bally Bagayoko joined a protest of hundreds of students at the Lycee Paul-Eluard.
Leave aside the fact that the mayor himself is out there encouraging burning and destruction, to his eternal disgrace. His name is a tell for the more unpleasant truth hiding behind these riots: Many rioters appear to come from the second- and third-generation offspring of France’s immigrant underclass. You need only watch the countless videos of the “protests” and the burning to notice this simple reality.
To hand-wave away this cultural/racial aspect of the violence — which is what France’s political and media classes do, needless to say — is to whistle past the graveyard. If Marine Le Pen actually wins the presidency in the next election, consider this a preview of the expected reaction among a powerfully disruptive segment of the country.
But perhaps to focus exclusively on that is also deceptive and distorting: France has long been held by a strange fascination with the “mystique of the mob” and the romance of mass violence — not just from 1789 onward but throughout its long and gnarled history. (Any reader knows full well that France’s history of mob violence has often arisen with, but never been exclusively confined to, the students.) On X, one commentator eloquently reminisces about his own college youth in France and his disgust with elite culture’s craven — and seemingly instinctive — cowering before the “moral authority” of protesters:
Authority becomes embarrassed to exercise authority. Rules exist, but nobody wants to enforce them. The majority understands that the situation is absurd, yet waits for somebody else to restore normality. A determined minority quickly learns that if it creates enough disruption, institutions will adapt themselves to the disruption rather than stop it.
And once that reflex becomes normal, it spreads far beyond schools.
You begin to get a society in which blocking roads, occupying universities, shutting down public buildings, preventing people from working or studying, and paralysing transport are treated not as exceptional breakdowns of normal life, but almost as recognised forms of political expression.
It is COWARDICE elevated into a social norm: the refusal to confront, to sanction, to impose limits, to say no. A whole culture of retreat in which passivity is mistaken for tolerance and fear of conflict for moral superiority.
Two views on a national crisis. As an outsider I am ill-qualified to assess which is the more determinative one. My suspicion is in fact that they work in concert with one another, in a spiral of radicalized alienation and escalation. Either way, for as much as we Americans take stock of our own problems, or laughingly grumble about how doomed Great Britain has become, there is France to remind us that things could always get worse.