OPINION:
France’s worst riots in years began in classrooms without enough chairs.
On Sept. 21, after days of initial strike action, students at Saint-Exupery high school in Creteil, a working-class suburb of Paris, blockaded their school over unfilled teaching posts, overcrowded classes and crumbling buildings. Within two weeks, the Interior Ministry counted more than 1,000 schools affected.
The movement then merged with unions, farmers and a revived Yellow Vest campaign against fuel prices and the cost of living. On Saturday, France paid the price.
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The Interior Ministry counted 550,000 demonstrators that day; organizers claimed 800,000. Police made nearly 2,400 arrests, and almost 1,000 police officers and gendarmes were injured, seven seriously. Thousands of shops were looted, burned or vandalized during the unrest.
In Limoges, rioters broke into the Town Hall and set the 19th-century monument on fire. In Marseille, intruders forced their way into City Hall and threw a bust of Marianne, the national emblem of the French Republic, onto the floor.
Most marchers came for schools and paychecks. In a televised address Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron blamed “insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals.” In Washington, President Trump blamed immigration.
Both describe who was on the street. Neither explains why a protest about classroom chairs ended at a burning town hall.
The answer lies in two currents with different logics that converged on a single target: the French state.
The first current is the one that Mr. Macron named. His interior minister, Laurent Nunez, counted “several thousand far-left individuals” determined to target public buildings. Within hours of the Limoges fire, a Spanish-language anarchist channel on Telegram was celebrating it, describing town halls and police stations as “petrified power” and recasting the students’ complaints as the opening of a class war.
The second current, which Mr. Macron’s address left unnamed, carries Palestinian flags.
Palestinian flags appeared in the student marches from the first days. Rima Hassan, a France Unbowed member of the European Parliament who this month removed the Israeli flag from an Oct. 7, 2023, memorial exhibit in Strasbourg, posted a photo of students waving Palestinian flags with the caption “More aware than the leaders.”
In Carpentras, home to one of France’s oldest Jewish communities, a video circulating online reportedly showed students beside a fire chanting that they had burned Israel and would trample the Jews.
The two currents need each other. One supplies the tactics and targets, the other a moral story that recruits teenagers. Inside Marseille City Hall, some intruders wore yellow vests, and others carried Palestinian flags beneath an anarchist symbol sprayed on the wall.
French Jews recognize the pattern. In 2019, Yellow Vest protesters hurled antisemitic abuse at the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. This month, the Jewish community of Rouen canceled its Oct. 7 commemoration.
This weekend, a congregation in Paris’ 19th arrondissement found its temporary prayer hall ransacked.
Mr. Macron promised that those who destroyed would pay and those who looted would reimburse. The omission fits a pattern.
On Sept. 22, at the United Nations General Assembly, he condemned what he called daily violations in the West Bank and declared that Hamas had “never been active” there, though Hamas has long operated in the West Bank and carried out attacks against Israelis.
A government that names only half of a convergence will miss the other half. If the crackdown quiets the insurrectionists, the second current remains intact, its symbols, online amplifiers and story ready to carry the next grievance into the street.
Silence also reads as permission.
Americans should watch closely. The U.S. has seen both currents. In Portland, Oregon, in 2020, largely peaceful protests after the killing of George Floyd gave cover to a fringe that attacked the federal courthouse night after night. Federal prosecutors charged 74 people with crimes, including arson and assault.
In 2024, demonstrators at Columbia University broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall under a Palestinian banner.
The lesson for Washington is the one that Paris has missed: Name every current that feeds the violence, including the ones that flatter one’s own politics.
Protest is a right. An attack on a town hall, a courthouse or a synagogue is a crime.
The students of Creteil deserve schools with enough chairs. Democracies honor that demand by keeping the street open to protest and closed to arson. France is learning that lesson in flames. America can learn it in time.
• Bradley Martin is the executive director of the Near East Center for Strategic Studies. Follow him on Facebook and X @ByBradleyMartin. Liram Koblentz-Stenzler is the head of the Global Extremism and Antisemitism Desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University.
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