By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-10-19 14:00:39 | Updated at 2026-10-19 20:00:03
11 hours ago
The town hall in Limoges, France, was built to persuade the French that their Republic was permanent. It opened on Bastille Day 1883, crowned with a 43-meter bell tower and decorated with coats of arms in the city’s own Haviland porcelain.
On Saturday evening, after a march that the mainstream media reported was a protest against the cost of living and educational standards, masked men broke in and set it alight. As a metaphor, it was so on the nose that, if it had appeared in a novel, an editor would have blocked its publication as too obvious a symbol of tragic civilizational decay.
By the following night, more than 2,500 people had been arrested across France. A police officer and a protester are dead. In Paris, rioters forced their way into the town hall of the 10th arrondissement, trapping around 100 people who had come for a breast cancer awareness event. According to Le Parisien, a couple in their eighties were robbed and left in the street in their underwear. In Marseille, looters emptied more than a hundred shops in the city center. The Louvre has closed “due to a student social movement.”
The more cynical amongst you may already be wondering why disaffected students would protest the quality of math and geography lessons in such an odd way. You would be right to be suspicious.
A synagogue on the Rue Burnouf in north-east Paris was ransacked overnight as part of these “marches,” its prayer books thrown across the floor. The veteran French broadcaster Paul Amar told CNews that the rioters somehow came with the addresses of Jewish shopkeepers, and that on one Marseille street every Jewish-owned business was set alight.
On Sunday the Journal du Dimanche, a national weekly, reported that Scorpion submachine guns had been found in the hands of rioters, some described as close to the Islamist movement, and that not all of them had been arrested. Again, you may be thinking that this is an unusual sort of student protest.
The naked truth is that France, such a symbol of all that is transcendent and inspirational about Western civilization, is showing what happens when mass immigration is allowed to run unfettered, with no real attempts at assimilation or integration. Hordes of unassimilated, violent barbarians thus have the numbers to cause real damage without any concern for the society they are destroying.
Where is the leadership to stop this? On the eve of the most recent protests, Emmanuel Macron was enjoying a Celine Dion concert. Monsieur Macron cannot run again when France votes next April; he won in 2017 and 2022 by governing “en même temps” (at the same time), harvesting voters from center-left and center-right at once. He beat the hard-right Marine Le Pen twice.
But a coalition assembled to stop someone cannot agree on what to do. Macron lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, called a snap election in 2024 that produced a hung parliament, and has since gone through four prime ministers. The poet W.B. Yeats wrote that “the center cannot hold,” in what may be the most over-quoted line in political journalism. Yet here it is apt; Macron’s squatting over the center ground has collapsed it, and what comes next will be very, very different.
The runaway favorite is Le Pen, of the National Rally. She leads the first round of next May’s presidential election at around 34%, double her nearest rival, despite a conviction on appeal this summer for misusing European Parliament funds. With the scenes across France what they are, you would assume her victory just got that much more likely, with repeated promises from the center to fix this issue proven to be a tissue of lies.
The old center is now so thin that antisemitic commie Jean-Luc Mélenchon is closing in on Édouard Philippe, Macron’s former prime minister, for a spot in the two-candidate run-off against Madame le Pen. Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, leads La France Insoumise (France Unbowed): think the DSA with Gallic arrogance. He tweeted “the police kill” in 2022. In 2023, he was so equivocal about rioting that even the French Communist Party’s leader disowned him. This weekend he praised the “tens of thousands calmly mobilized” and blamed the government for the rest.
Most interestingly, he is also open about his desire for “creolization,” the process of old and new France mixing to create a new culture distinct from the France of old. This theory encompasses an ethnic dimension, but is much broader. It also goes without saying that he wants to end the Fifth Republic and replace it with a fundamentally different state. This is at least more honest than many radical progressives who still aim to wear the skinsuits of the status quo.
France has spent the years since the riots of 2005 arguing about immigration and integration, usually with greater intensity after each fresh outbreak of violence. Yet the same questions return. What does integration require? Who is responsible when it fails? Is Islam, specifically, compatible with French values? And what will the state do when its authority is openly challenged?
It is not just the integration issue, of course. France’s economy is in freefall, raising fears of an IMF bailout. But while economic problems are as old as time, no advanced country has ever had social and cultural issues from immigration as glaring as France’s. It is a warning to the rest of the world. The remedies required to solve these issues will be deeply divisive and difficult; these protests prove that. They are also, perhaps, a warning of what will happen if it is not addressed.
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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
