By Matt Roberts
27 October 2026 7:35 PM
The violence, looting and burning in France over the weekend of October 24th-25th was somewhat less intense and widespread than it had been on the previous weekend, but it was still significant. A demonstration comprising an estimated 400,000 people took place on the Saturday in Paris, confined to the south-eastern edge of the city, and this was followed by violent clashes with police near Porte de Vincennes, about a 45-minute walk from the Place de la Bastille. Water cannon and tear gas were used. Around 500 rioters were estimated to have broken off from the main protest. There were more clashes, as well as bin fires and looting in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, Nantes, Grenoble, Rennes and several other parts of France. There were around 1,000 arrests nationwide (1,300 by some reports), with 70,000 police having been deployed to the streets, which was a substantial increase on the previous weekend’s deployment. Activists have called for further action on October 31st, and it’s clear that the sentiment behind the unrest hasn’t gone away. The weather on the 31st is forecast to be mild and dry, more similar to that of the 17th than the wetter, colder 24th, so it remains to be seen how much the tensions have been defused, and to what extent the less dedicated were put off by the weather.
There are two competing narratives in the media (mainstream and alternative) about the motivations for the unrest, and indeed the nature of the unrest. On the one hand, this is a ‘mostly peaceful’ expression of the French people’s frustration with public services. It started with teachers and students protesting against the underfunding of schools, and has widened to express a broader discontent with austerity measures and the economy in general. On the other hand, this is a violent ethno-religious-communist uprising trying to bring down the French state and overturn French society.
The violence, looting and burning in France over the weekend of October 24th-25th was somewhat less intense and widespread than it had been on the previous weekend, but it was still significant. A demonstration comprising an estimated 400,000 people took place on the Saturday in Paris, confined to the south-eastern edge of the city, and this was followed by violent clashes with police near Porte de Vincennes, about a 45-minute walk from the Place de la Bastille. Water cannon and tear gas were used. Around 500 rioters were estimated to have broken off from the main protest. There were more clashes, as well as bin fires and looting in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, Nantes, Grenoble, Rennes and several other parts of France. There were around 1,000 arrests nationwide (1,300 by some reports), with 70,000 police having been deployed to the streets, which was a substantial increase on the previous weekend’s deployment. Activists have called for further action on October 31st, and it’s clear that the sentiment behind the unrest hasn’t gone away. The weather on the 31st is forecast to be mild and dry, more similar to that of the 17th than the wetter, colder 24th, so it remains to be seen how much the tensions have been defused, and to what extent the less dedicated were put off by the weather.
There are two competing narratives in the media (mainstream and alternative) about the motivations for the unrest, and indeed the nature of the unrest. On the one hand, this is a ‘mostly peaceful’ expression of the French people’s frustration with public services. It started with teachers and students protesting against the underfunding of schools, and has widened to express a broader discontent with austerity measures and the economy in general. On the other hand, this is a violent ethno-religious-communist uprising trying to bring down the French state and overturn French society.
Legacy media would have you believe the first of these is true, given the footage they’re showing and the voiceovers they’re providing. Just a brief sojourn into X, Rumble or YouTube will have you come away convinced of the second. Interestingly, the French political Establishment seems to be more aligned with the insurrection view than the peaceful protest view. Less than a week before the first outbreak of violence, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (‘France Unbowed’) was calling for the formation of a Sixth Republic of ‘popular power’. On October 22nd, addressing the nation, Macron referred to “political and even seditious acts carried out by organised ultra-Left groups whose aim is to bring down the Republic”. Laurent Nuñez, France’s Interior Minister, referred to “very high levels of violence” and “militants of the ultra-Left movement, of the extreme far Left”. Although they’re comfortable calling out the black bloc activists that can be seen on the streets, they’re ignoring the Islamic slogans and the ethnic composition of many of the perpetrators that the rest of us can see on X.
These two narratives are not mutually exclusive. There is both a mass peaceful demonstration against perceived underinvestment in public services and a violent uprising from an alliance of convenience of anti-Western forces. In this sense, there is an opportunity to use France as an object lesson on this side of the channel. It is a lesson we have been refusing to learn from our own situation, and which has been offered to us grindingly slowly in our own politics and on our streets: the techno-managerial social democratic project rests on a utopian fiction. If we are interested in preserving our civilisation, then we really must start paying attention.
In Britain, across almost all of the EU and into the Anglosphere (possibly excepting the United States), the fiction goes something like this: if the state can hoover up just the right amount of money and distribute it correctly through services and benefits, guided by experts and technocrats, eventually we will achieve a settled, prosperous society. The system is imperfect, but perfectible. All that it needs is just the last tax increase, the ideal budget, or a carefully planned management structure, and all will be well. It’s just over the horizon, but the direction of travel is the right one. It must be, because that’s how we planned it. In the meantime, all of this will be improved by importing human capital from far-flung parts of the world. Since culture and tribalism are essentially artificial, this will be a success as soon as we achieve something called integration.
Many reading this will doubtless already have concluded that this is indeed a dangerous fiction. The interesting thing is that our political, media and institutional class don’t seem to be able to look across the channel and see the urgent evidence of the delusion.
If it really were a case of the right amount of resources being allocated through the state, then surely France would be closer to nirvana than we are in Britain? French public sector spending accounts for around 57% of the country’s GDP. Social spending – that is, cash benefits and in-kind services for old age, health, family, unemployment, incapacity, housing, and so on – accounts for fully 30% of GDP. This compares to 49.4% and 28% state expenditure and social spending respectively for Germany, 47% and 23% for the UK and 37% and 19.8% for the US. In Communist China, the state accounts for around 33% of GDP and 10-13% is spent on social benefits. In the USSR in 1988, something like 51% of spending was by the state; roughly 15-20% was social spending (these last two are necessarily estimates, because the data are neither easily available nor reliable).
Nor is it true that Macron himself has overseen meaningful cuts to services and benefits. It was part of his persona in 2017 when first elected that he was going to restore sanity to French public spending and make some of the difficult decisions that his predecessors had avoided. In reality, he hasn’t. As the chart shows, in 2017, he inherited public sector spending at 57.5% of GDP, had some initial success in driving it down to a mere 55.3% by 2019, and then indulged in the same kind of massive increases that we saw across the rest of the developed world in 2020. It’s fallen since, and then risen again, but net, the change is a reduction of two-tenths of one per cent of GDP over seven years, while the economy itself has grown by some 10-11% in real terms.
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