The rioters who must not be named

A month ago, a protest over crumbling classrooms and absent teachers began in the working-class suburbs north of Paris. Today it is a national crisis. About 550,000 people marched across France on Oct. 17, and the day brought scenes of looted shops, attacked buildings, and clashes with police. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported 1,200 arrests and 150 injured officers. A fire largely destroyed the historic town hall in Limoges. Twenty-four schools had already been burned or ransacked by early October, and total arrests now exceed 6,000.

French President Emmanuel Macron, six months from leaving office, offered his diagnosis to his cabinet. He said that young people have legitimate concerns but that political forces are exploiting them, and he asked for concrete answers within weeks. He vowed that those responsible for the violence would be prosecuted and punished. Notice what he did not say: Who, specifically, is doing the burning, and why a dispute over desks and substitute teachers turned so quickly into torched buildings.

The grievances may be real. Soaring fuel prices and a budget built on 54 billion euros in cuts and new taxes have swollen the crowds. Many of the students marching simply want teachers who show up.

But what French officials are reluctant to state openly is that these chaotic protests are largely driven by descendants of immigrants. Recent immigrants fear being caught and stay home. It is the second and third generations, raised in France, who feel entitled to its benefits without feeling loyal to its way of life, and they set the chaotic stage.

France forbids ethnic statistics, so no one can make this case with mere numbers, although we hear it from eyewitnesses. That inability to even ask is part of the problem. Officials reach for “youths,” “urban violence,” and “social tensions.” Each term is accurate and useless. A government that cannot name what it sees can never manage it.

President Trump said this was about mass migration and Islam wanting to take over a once great country. He offered no evidence, and officials have found no link to religious demands. However, dismissing him does not answer the point he raised, especially given the clear tendency of many Muslims to assert Islam’s superiority and hegemony in non-Muslim societies, and the plain statements of Islam’s sources elevating Islam over all others.

Another force is at work, and it is funded and organized. News outlets identified 50 organizations around the movement; only 15 are student or youth groups. The adult groups include a dozen unions, eight communist or socialist organizations, and parties such as La France Insoumise and the French Communist Party. The evidence was hard to miss on the streets of Paris: red flags, a banner reading “Class War” beneath a hammer and sickle, and Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel posing with marchers. Fox News Digital traced one outlet amplifying the unrest to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech tycoon who has bankrolled far-left groups. The playbook is old: Find a real grievance, inflate it, and aim it at the state.

Communism has never solved grievances; it only harvests them. So, the French street has two disordering engines: grievance without loyalty, and ideology that feeds on it.

The cause is plain enough: France gave newcomers housing blocks and benefits but rarely asked them to become French, assimilating and adopting the French lifestyle and culture, then left that vacuum to ideologues who profit from rage. With the flourishing of radical-left sentiments under Macron, and the politically correct denial of Islamists’ insistence on creeping into French political spheres, the distortion of the French scene is now evident.

Still, France must survive, and we should all hope for that. The cure is not despair, because France has been here before and rose again. This is the country that survived 1789, 1871, 1940, and 1968, and rebuilt Notre-Dame in five years after the fire.

A nation like that can mend this chaos.

Begin with the students, who may have been right about the classrooms: Fix the school system. Then do the harder things. Enforce French rules evenly and without apology. Tie citizenship to language, law, and loyalty. Control who enters without apology. Deport proven criminals immediately. Make foundations and activist groups show where their money comes from, and stop paying for movements that despise the republic and French values and culture. Unapologetically teach communism’s crimes as plainly as we teach the Holocaust, so a hammer and sickle never again looks like youthful rebellion. Communist regimes left tens of millions dead, and no French teenager should meet that ideology first as a slogan.

And Western nations should stand beside France, not smirk at it. This is a warning to every free country. France does not need chastisement or pity; it needs allies honest enough to name what they see. Say it clearly, and the nation of Pascal, Hugo, and de Gaulle will do what it has always done: recover, survive, and flourish. Let’s hope for that.