The French have always been better at revolutions than the rest of us. We English managed one, beheaded a king, found we did not much care for the alternative and put his son back on the throne eleven years later, with apologies all round. The French did it properly: the Bastille, the guillotine, the barricades of 1830, 1848 and the Commune, the students of May 1968 prising up the cobblestones of the Latin Quarter in search of the beach underneath. To take to the streets is not, in France, a sign that something has gone wrong. It is practically a civic duty, like voting or complaining about the bread.
Even by those standards, the past month has been something special. On Saturday 17 October, according to the Interior Ministry, 550,000 people marched in 110 cities across France; the organisers said 800,000. By nightfall Paris was full of tear gas, burning cars and smashed shopfronts. In Marseille protesters breached the town hall and looted shops, and a fire engine was set alight. In Lyon a tourist office was torched. In Limoges, the historic town hall was largely destroyed by fire. Around a thousand police officers and gendarmes were injured. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested in a single day, and more than 6,800 have been taken into custody since the trouble began, most of them minors. Riots have spread to Belgium and Italy. Donald Trump, never one to miss a European misfortune, announced that “France is burning!” For once, he was not entirely exaggerating.
It started with some teenagers complaining about their school.
On 21 September, pupils at the Lycée Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a suburb south-east of Paris, walked out the day after a teachers’ strike. Their grievances were not revolutionary. Teachers who had left were not being replaced. Classes were overcrowded. The buildings were crumbling. During the heatwave, classrooms had reportedly reached 40 degrees, which is roughly the temperature at which I start to lose the will to live, let alone revise for my baccalauréat. And there was Parcoursup, the dreaded national university-admissions algorithm, which reduces every French teenager’s future to a ranking on a website and which causes more anxiety among the young than anything since acne. The high-school union listed four demands: replace the missing staff, fix the “dilapidated” schools, lighten the overloaded timetables and do something about the stress of Parcoursup. If you can find anything sinister in that, you have a more fevered imagination than I do.
It spread like wildfire through the poorer suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and then across the country. By the start of October more than a thousand lycées were affected. Then the trade unions joined in, then the university students, then the nurses and the firefighters and the farmers and the pensioners, and the protest about crumbling schools became a protest about everything: wages, pensions, prices, taxes, public services and a government that has borrowed so much money that France’s borrowing costs are at their highest in more than twenty years. And then, as night follows day and as surely as a Frenchman follows a strike, the remnants of the “yellow vest” movement turned up, followed by the people who were never interested in schools at all.
This is the depressingly familiar part, and it is not only French. I have watched it happen in city after city, cause after cause. A genuine grievance brings decent people on to the streets. Then, after dark, come the others: masked young men in black who have no interest whatsoever in the cause, except as cover. In 2011 a police shooting in Tottenham was the spark for riots across England, and within forty-eight hours the most urgent political demand of the rioters appeared to be a flat-screen television from Currys. In 2020 the killing of George Floyd sent millions of Americans out to protest peacefully against police brutality – them many of the people who joined them in the evenings took the opportunity to hunt down white business owners and clear out the local Apple store and Foot Locker. In 2023, after a police officer shot a teenager called Nahel in Nanterre, French suburbs burned for a week and the looters helped themselves to trainers and phones. Macron’s response at the time was to blame video games, which went down about as well as you would expect.
The pattern this time has been the same. At the Lycée Vauquelin in Paris, masked men attacked the school; the head teacher said not one of them was a pupil. Twenty-four schools had been burned or ransacked by early October, which is a curious way to campaign for better school buildings. And on 17 October, while half a million people marched peacefully, gangs in black smashed shopfronts and walked off with wine and electronics. I am sure they were deeply concerned about the shortage of maths teachers in Créteil. Nothing says “I care about the future of French education” like a stolen bottle of Bordeaux and a pair of trainers you will be wearing in a police cell by Monday.
I am going to be unfashionably blunt. A great many of the people who hijack these protests are not activists. They are bored, they are angry about nothing in particular, and they have discovered that burning a car is more entertaining than anything else on offer in their lives. Riot as a leisure activity. Arson as a hobby. It is a sort of grim extreme sport, live-streamed on TikTok, in which the prize is a new iPhone and the opportunity to post a video of a burning bus. It has no politics, no demands and no conscience, and every time it happens it wrecks the cause of the people who marched in good faith.
Not that the state has covered itself in glory either. Human rights groups have documented some appalling injuries to children: a 15-year-old in Lens who lost a hand to a police grenade, a 16-year-old in Tours who lost the use of an eye, apparently to a rubber bullet, a 14-year-old with a broken jaw. Amnesty International has called the use of force “disproportionate”, and the UN has asked France to calm down. The police watchdog is investigating. When you set out to stop teenagers blocking the gates of their own school and end up blinding them, something has gone badly wrong.
Which brings me to Emmanuel Macron, and here I must declare a bias. I like Macron. I have always rather liked him, in the way one likes a clever, faintly insufferable cousin who turns out to be right about most things. On the issue I care about most, he has been magnificent. When much of Europe dithered over Ukraine, Macron refused to rule out sending European troops, pushed for European rearmament, and has spent much of the past two years trying to build a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine whether or not Washington bothers to turn up. In Kyiv, where I live, that counts for a great deal. He sees, as few European leaders do, that Russia is not a problem that will go away if we ignore it hard enough.
But Macron has a fatal flaw, and this crisis has exposed it brutally. He is very good at the big picture and hopeless at the small one. He can give a three-hour speech on European strategic autonomy without notes, but he seems never to have noticed that the roof of the school in Créteil was leaking. He governs like a philosopher-king from somewhere far above the clouds, the “Jupiterian” president of his own description, and for a month, while his country’s teenagers walked out of school in their hundreds of thousands, Jupiter stayed on Olympus. He has gone through prime ministers at a rate that would embarrass the Conservative Party. It was not until the country was on fire that he went on television, on Sunday 18 October, to express his “anger and shame”, promise that those who “destroyed, smashed and looted” would “pay for their crimes”, acknowledge that the protesters had “legitimate demands”, and announce that “lessons will be learned”. By Thursday he was blaming the “seditious” ultra-left for trying to “bring down the Republic” and banning protests in the centres of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Grenoble. He is not wrong about the ultra-left, and the government says its intelligence services describe the movement as partly organised by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, which denies it. But it is a little late to discover that schools matter when they are already alight.
Here is my angle, and it is not a cheerful one. The real winner of this autumn is neither the students, nor the unions, nor the looters, nor Macron. It is Marine Le Pen.
Le Pen has spent a decade presenting herself as the candidate of order, and every burning car on the evening news is a free party political broadcast. “We are experiencing a crisis of confidence,” she said this week, calling Macron “without credibility or authority” and condemning the “hijacking of this anger by thugs who are sowing chaos”. Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, told the French to “wake up” and make “the right political choices”. The French appear to be listening. A poll published in Le Figaro this week, taken hours after the riots, put Le Pen on 34 to 38 per cent in the first round of next April’s presidential election, double Mélenchon’s score, and showed her beating him by 68 to 32 in a run-off. In July a Paris appeal court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds but cut her ban from office in a way that means she can stand, provided she can campaign in an electronic ankle tag. If that sounds like a minor inconvenience, consider that this time last year she was supposed to be out of the race altogether.
I have nothing against a French politician promising to restore order. What worries me is what else comes with Le Pen. In 2014 her party took a loan of more than €9 million from a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank, after French banks declined to lend to it; it was repaid only in 2023. She later said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal. In 2017, a month before the first round of the presidential election, she flew to Moscow and was photographed with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. In 2022 her party had to pulp campaign leaflets showing her shaking his hand. She has since condemned the invasion of Ukraine and toned down her rhetoric, as the polls required, but she has opposed sending Ukraine long-range weapons and western troops, and her instinct has always been that France’s quarrel with Russia is somebody else’s business. A President Le Pen would not need to love Putin. She would only need to stop Macron’s coalition of the willing in its tracks, and Europe’s support for Ukraine would collapse like a soufflé in a draught.
So think about the chain of events. A group of teenagers in Créteil asked for a working roof and a maths teacher. Their protest was hijacked by the ultra-left and by thugs who wanted trainers and a bonfire. The thugs gave the far right the pictures it needed. The far right is now the favourite to win the presidency. And the presidency, in a few months’ time, may pass to a woman who once took Russian money, once said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal and once flew to the Kremlin for a photograph. The looter in Paris who stole a pair of Nikes on Saturday night may have done more for Vladimir Putin than the entire staff of Russia Today.
What happens next? The unions are planning a national day of action on 5 November. The yellow vests are expected back on the streets this weekend. The bans on protests in city centres will be tested. Macron has convened his defence council, as though the enemy were foreign rather than sitting in his own lycées. The students, meanwhile, have gone on their autumn half-term holiday, which may do more to calm things than anything the government has managed, since nothing kills revolutionary fervour quite like a week at your grandmother’s in the Dordogne.
If Macron wants to rescue the last six months of his presidency, he could do worse than to go back to where this began. Fix the schools. Pay the teachers. Mend the roofs. Scrap or reform Parcoursup. Give the kids who started all this a win, and separate them, publicly and generously, from the people who burned down their schools in their name. That is how you take the oxygen away from Le Pen. Banning protests and blaming Mélenchon will not do it.
The French invented the modern idea of the citizen standing up to the state. It would be a bitter irony if this autumn’s revolution, which began with teenagers asking for a decent education, ended with France electing a president whose old friends live in the Kremlin. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Or, as the looters would have it, liberté, égalité, Nike Air Max.