France

BBC Live – We’ve just met two 18-year-olds who have joined the rally in Paris.

The teenagers – who didn’t want to give their names – say their generation is in despair and feel abandoned by the Macron government.

One of them claims the police have been totally disproportionate in their treatment of the student protest.

I ask why he’s covering his face. He replies it’s because it’s cold and because there may be tear gas. He says the looting of last weekend was unacceptable.

Guardian live stream – Thousands march in Paris and other French cities as protests take place across Europe – Europe live

🚨🇫🇷 France Now

It’s started again, not in Paris, Marseille, Toulouse or Lyon but the historic quaint City of Pau – as Police pelt Far Left Protestors & Islamists with stun grenades

You are witnessing the collapse of Western Civilisation in real time https://t.co/XsUJUSxSFM

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) October 24, 2026

These days, as you watch Paris burning, you may be thinking of a number of different people – some real, some fictitious – who have wandered its fabled streets. Robespierre. Zola. Piaf. Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities. Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. Gigi. Coco Chanel.

Me, I think of James. Of two Jameses, in fact – both of them gay men who, born and raised in New Jersey, chose to spend their adult lives and pursue their careers in the City of Lights.

On the night of October 17-18, 2026, France saw some of its worst urban violence in years. What began as largely peaceful demonstrations over the cost of living, high fuel prices, and the state of public services—especially schools—descended into widespread rioting, arson, and looting across multiple cities. The most established media outlets acknowledge “scenes of war.” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez put the number of participants at roughly 550,000 nationwide (the communist union CGT claimed closer to 800,000), with about 110,000 in Paris. Police made approximately 1,800 arrests, including a record of more than 1,200 in the capital. More than 900 police officers were injured.

Apocalypse in France. Police attacked on the run. Macron will blame AI but it’s real. https://t.co/h5m8aK6IV8

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) October 23, 2026

With France’s next major protest planned for Oct. 24, the government has decided to send the military into the streets, with soldiers preparing to help police control any unrest.

The government announced on Tuesday that it would reinforce police forces with soldiers and carry out a massive security operation ahead of protests planned for Saturday. The authorities also admitted that they made mistakes in their response to last weekend’s violence.

It is all about birth rates, ethnicity, and demography.

These riots have little to do with economic problems. There always have been and will be economic problems.

What you’re seeing here is ethnic warfare: Africa is conquering France. https://t.co/rFtTofaj21

— Martin Sellner (@MartinSellner_) October 2, 2026

Back in the halcyon days of 2011, my wife and I spent a year living in Montpellier, France, on the Mediterranean coast. We had an apartment in the old medieval city center, surrounded by narrow winding cobblestone streets. Our place was on the fifth floor, reachable only by a worn spiral stone staircase. It was a five-minute walk to the city’s main square, a daily farmer’s market, an 18th-century aqueduct, and the oldest medical school in the world still in operation, established in 1220.

🇫🇷 CHAOTIC scenes in Bordeaux, as crowds of protesters rush through the streets near French riot police vehicles.

They are seen running after CRS police trucks as tensions erupt in the city center.

Demonstrators accused officers of using tear gas, while crowds continued moving through the streets despite police attempts to disperse them.

Writer: Sol
https://t.co/Hb9DIiVcsw

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 22, 2026

As France has descended into anarchy, enduring its most destructive and violent rioting in decades, most of the candidates to replace Emmanuel Macron as president have condemned the chaos and vowed a swift restoration of order. Not so Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Islamo-left firebrand and presidential candidate for La France Insoumise (LFI), who has been busy fanning the flames.

Maybe …

🚨 Paris, minutes ago. During Macron’s live address to the nation, a Republican Guard soldier posted directly behind him suddenly BREAKS protocol ⚠️

He shifts rapidly, glances around nervously, then abruptly turns and marches off stage in full view of the cameras while Macron continues speaking without missing a beat.

No explanation.
No acknowledgment from the President.
Just a soldier walking away from his post on national television as the country watches in stunned silence from the Élysée.

France is already on fire: riots, strikes, record-low approval, mutiny rumors in the military.
And now this.

Silent act of defiance?
Mental breakdown under pressure?
Or the first visible crack in a system that’s about to shatter?

Whatever it was… it wasn’t accidental.

Something just moved.
And everyone felt it.

— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) November 29, 2025

French sovereigntist Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has diagnosed state power collapse being observed in real time in France, as she tells the public they have “an extremely important choice to make” in the forthcoming elections.

There’s no guarantee that French culture and traditions will survive ceaseless attacks from discontents inside the country.

@DouglasKMurray dives into this in his recent column. Read it here: https://t.co/ctCXMPSfS2 https://t.co/bNfLToHJi2

— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 21, 2026

Excellent vid.

Entire fantastic article by BRENDA POWER below (the rest in comments)

Liberal Woman Who’s The Emblem of French Plight

AN ELEGANT Parisian woman in a chestnut wool coat, sunglasses perched on the black headband in her long blonde hair, stands at the door of a ruined grocery shop as masked looters descend upon it.
She is every privileged, middle-class, thirtysomething Western woman you’ve ever seen at a pro-Palestinian, pro-immigrant march, wearing a keffiyeh and waving a ‘Refugees Welcome’ placard, chanting, ‘From the river to the sea’.

Madame Everywoman has so despaired of the bigotry of the far right, and denounced the vile racism of the fascist commentators warning that Europe is being ‘invaded’ by Islamists, seeking to overrun and replace the continent’s indigenous population.
She has applauded the sight of blue-eyed policing on city streets across France, the UK, Italy, Germany as heart-twinging evidence of ‘multiculturalism’. She’s supported the introduction of more halal outlets, even though the Islamic slaughter method is cruel and bloody, and welcomed the neutralisation of backward old Christian observances like Christmas and Easter into ‘winter’ and ‘spring’ festivals.

She’s supported bans on dogs being walked in certain parts of Paris because Islam considers them unclean, thinks burkas are an expression of female will, and insists that immigrants from non-Christian cultures enrich, energise and enlighten our home-grown Western societies. Unless they’re Jews, obviously.
And until that is, they active masked and such-handed to ‘enlighten’ the shelves of her friends’ grocery store of all their goods — taking alcohol test, in many cases, leaving only the ‘haram’ pork products strewn on the floor — and enriching only themselves. The footage of Madame Everywoman coming face-to-spitting, seething face with the culture she has championed has circled the globe over the last few days, as the French riots spread countryside and beyond. ‘This is not the cause,’ she pleads with the masked looters, nearly all young men, as they push past her to ransack the store.

She has supported them, she wails, she is on their side, she shares their ideology, they have the same objectives of liberty, equality, peace, prosperity — burning and looting shops in dire suburbs was never in the script.

They push her aside, tell her clear off if she doesn’t want to get hurt, she turns to the camera, the picture of anguished realisation dawning just a little too late, a human metaphor for modern, liberal, progressive Europe’s tardy awakening to the medieval fate it has unwittingly sealed — there is no shared ideology, there is no political conviction, there’s no noble aspiration or mutual goal, just a brutal, marauding horde with no objective but to pillage and destroy, and nothing in their hearts but well-deserved contempt for useful Western idiots like Madame Everywoman and her keffiyeh-toting ilk. If asunder empathy has a face, it’s that elegant Parisian woman in her chic headband, her expensive coat and her utter bewilderment.

These protests are far more than shout poor educational facilities.
Pictures of thugs fleeing Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton stores with armfuls of designer clothing appear online, satirically captioned, ‘French students desperately seeking new school uniforms.’

Now they are just a sinister flex by a menacing cohort which has steadily infiltrated western Europe over the past decade, exploiting colonial guilt, the positive, preening vanity that passes for political debate on social media, and the witless purity spiralling of liberal competitive wokeness.

Five years ago, it would have been considered a hate crime to suggest that while most migrants were genuinely well-intentioned people simply hoping for a better life, there was a significant number from incompatible cultures driven by envy and hatred of Western liberties, whose aim was to despoil, plunder and subjugate the liberal societies …cont in comments

— Susanne Delaney (@SuzieD755164) October 21, 2026

Worth the time …

The urban violence that has gripped France over the past week has been wilfully misunderstood.

Some still claim that the widespread rioting is part of a protest about education or the cost of living. Others unthinkingly insist that it is simply part of French people’s long-standing, popular tradition of taking to the streets to make their views known. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the Islamo-leftist La France Insoumise (LFI), has even invoked the spirit of the May 1968 protests – when student revolts and a general strike brought France to a standstill – to justify the riots. Rival politicians and commentators have since rounded on Mélenchon and blamed LFI for encouraging and licensing the violent behaviour of the rioters.

Don’t believe your lyin eyes!

— Blazingcatfur (@fancypants_s) October 21, 2026

Why do the rioters trashing Paris wave the ‘Palestinian’ flag? Because to them, France is Israel and they’re the ‘Palestinians’ out to destroy it and replace it with their own terrorist state.

The ‘white’ in the ‘Palestinian’ flag represents the Umayyad caliphate which had once invaded France, conquered Narbonne, and genocided its Christian population, until it was thrown back by indigenous Christian resistance at the Battle of Toulouse and the Battle of Tours.

The looting in Paris today.. France riots https://t.co/lzz3sLLB80

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 17, 2026

In Revolutionary France, the guillotine was a privilege reserved for the nobility, though the nobles themselves would surely have preferred a different sort of privilege. Before the Revolution, commoners were simply hanged. But when equality was extended to criminal law, decapitation became the fate of everyone, neatly encapsulating the peculiar humanitarian sensibility of the revolutionaries in their determined pursuit of equality. But beheading people is an expensive business, especially when you are unleashing the Terror and planning to remove the heads of more than a thousand citizens every week. Consider that executioners were paid around $700, and that the axes of the time, as has been documented, lost their edge far too quickly. Whether this was due to the executioners’ incompetence or the stubborn resilience of their victims’ necks, I cannot say. The revolutionaries therefore turned to the famous invention of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin: the guillotine, which P. G. Wodehouse described as the only remedy for grey hair.

🇫🇷 Looters and rioters are presented as heroes by far-left media and politicians https://t.co/5aqXxPnrVR

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 21, 2026

French intelligence services have reportedly identified the far-left as having been at the forefront of the violence that occurred during the riots across the country on Saturday, including Antifa and other similar radical groups.

You can’t make this up: @EmmanuelMacron claims scenes of riots in France are AI-generated 🤯 https://t.co/BfX02ztwo6

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 21, 2026

A couple of vids/stills were AI but nowhere near what Macron implies.