The French Far-Left and the Muslim Company It Keeps

The disorders that have spread across France are being wrongly described as only demands for improvements in the physical plants of schools and for more teachers. But the extreme violence, which Muslim students have led and members of the far-left party La France Insoumise have supported, are no longer about the schools. They are a test of wills between the Muslim population and the French state, whose representatives — the police, the teachers, and the school administrators — have been attacked. More on this contest can be found here: “France’s insane student protests are really about a growing radical Muslim population that wants to get rid of democracy,” by Dominic Green, New York Post, October 10, 2026:

The French are revolting. It’s a tradition with them. Riots are as French as croissants, adultery and the 35-hour work week.

France’s current riots may, however, presage the fall of the Fifth Republic.

Mobs of students in the streets. Schools going up in flames. Police using tear gas and flash-ball guns. Hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests.

The spark for the disorder was strikes by left-wing teachers and other public-sector workers, including firemen. The students besieged their schools at once.

The truants claim they’re protesting overcrowded and underfunded schools.

Nothing says “Please address schoolroom overcrowding” like setting fire to a fireman and filming it.

Nothing says “Please raise the biggest education budget in the OECD” like a masked youth kicking a policewoman in the head.

The disorder is backed by the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is second in the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

The riots, French intelligence agencies told a government crisis meeting on Oct. 1, originated as “an operation organized by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left.”

“LFI has always advocated non-violent demonstrations,” LFI parliamentary deputy Louis Boyard replied….

The LFI is offering an inversion of reality: the police are the forces of order, the “youth” (some of whom are far too old to be students) are the ones causing the mob violence, the destruction of police and private cars, the setting fire to rubbish bins, the smashing of shop windows, the heaving of projectiles, the dousing with gasoline, the savage beatings of policemen, firemen, teachers, and school administrators.

Mélenchon, a 75-year-old communist, is an old leftist, but also a new immigrant. Born and raised in Morocco, he came to France in 1962, one among the millions who crossed the Mediterranean as Europe’s empires folded.

Only days before the protests began, the French turned out to greet Pope Leo XIV. Mélenchon and the LFI have helped to turn the same streets into the stage of bloodshed and destruction.

The former head of the French General Staff from 2014 to 2017, General Pierre de Villiers, has said, in response to the latest riots across the land, that “We are in a strange period, and my fear is civil war.” The celebrated French writer Michel Hoeullebecq, has said to the Financial Times that “We are witnessing a disintegration. It is a catastrophe.” With the blood-and-petrol soaked uniforms of the police, the fires set to garbage bins, blockades, and parts of school buildings, the forced closing by the rioters of more than 4,000 lycées, and with more than 700 injured police and gendarmes, who could disagree?