Mike Starkey writes: It’s early afternoon on Friday 16 October 2026. I enter the public transport office in central Strasbourg, next to the Alt Winmärik tram stop. Alt Winmärik means Old Wine Market in the old Germanic Alsace dialect. From the 14th century onwards, this street was the place wine was bought and sold. A genial, middle-aged man asks me how he can help.
‘I’ve just paid one of your machines for a 10-trip book of electronic tickets to be added to my travel card,’ I say. ‘See, here’s my receipt. But when I tap my card on the red machine before getting on a tram, it says I only have two trips left.’
‘Ah yes’, he replies with a Gallic shrug. ‘The red machines can’t count above nine.’
I try an exaggerated look of French incredulity. ‘What?’
‘Well, double-digit numbers don’t show when you swipe your card on the red machines. Let’s check on my big machine here how many trips you have left. Look, you actually have 32 trips on your card.’
‘But that’s crazy and misleading’.
‘Yes’, he beams. ‘It is.’
A Night of Rioting
The following evening, Saturday 17 October, the same public transport office is destroyed in the riots erupting across French cities. Youths in black hoodies and balaclavas kick in the windows, smash furniture and daub the walls with graffiti. Colourful transport leaflets spill out onto the pavement.
The rest of that evening and long into the night, I can’t tear my eyes away from French media and social media. Limoges’ historic Town Hall burning. Lyon’s ornate tourist information office in flames, with local police saying ‘hostile individuals’ are preventing firefighters from tackling the blaze. Stores in central Lyon looted. Marseille looking like a war zone. Restaurants and cars on fire near Paris’s Place de la République. The stunning Galéries Lafayette department store smashed up.
As Sunday 18 October dawns, further images and footage emerge. Lyon shopkeepers and restaurateurs weeping as they survey the ruins of businesses they put their lives into. A young Parisian woman tearfully begging looters to stop. Footage of an elderly man telling a gang of youths they have no right to destroy property, while they jeer and call him a racist. More than 600 police and firefighters injured.
I sit on a tram heading across Strasbourg, to lead the morning service at the city’s multi-ethnic Anglican Church—27 nationalities, meeting in a beautifully austere Dominican church near the University and Botanic Gardens. They’re currently without a full-time priest, and I’m the locum minister for October.
Strasbourg is my current crush in a lifelong love-affair with France. My university degree was in French. I’ve worked in a high school and radio station in Orléans, the Paris offices of Peugeot-Citroën, and churches in Grenoble, Versailles and Paris. This morning I sit on the Strasbourg tram feeling numb, uncertain how I feel about that love affair now. My tram goes past the destroyed remains of the transport office, where wooden hoardings cover the smashed windows. It passes shattered tram and bus shelters. The apocalyptic scenes from the night before, and the tears of its victims, replay in my mind.
Just the French Being French…?
The French nation, and a horrified world, are rightly asking hard questions about who the rioters were, why they were rioting, and what the main underlying issues were. The two most popular answers on offer are both true, but limited.
One is that it’s just the French being French. This is, after all, a people whose national mythology and self-image was shaped during the French Revolution in the late 18th century. The French still idealise its spirit and energy. The revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the tricolour flag, and Marianne (the personification of the Republic as a young woman) remain iconic.
More recently, in May 1968, the streets of Paris erupted in civil unrest, student occupations and strikes. Police crackdowns in the Latin Quarter were met with street battles and barricades. Like the French Revolution, 1968 shaped French self-image and provided a cultural template for dissent ever since. The language and imagery of ’68 are still readily seized on to give an air of legitimacy to any street protest.
As a consequence of the Revolution and 1968, the French have a high cultural tolerance for direct action in the streets, property damage, burning cars, and violence towards the police. There’s a lingering sense that protesting in the streets is noble and liberating. But this backdrop still doesn’t tell us much about why these people, and why now.
Disgruntled Students
The other popular explanation for the 2026 riots is that these are disgruntled high school and university students complaining about dilapidated buildings, overcrowded classrooms and general underfunding of education. This is the banner under which the recent protests were organised, and has been the line taken in many media outlets including the BBC. Even as the rioting turned apocalyptic, some media outlets were still saying the rioting was due to a shortage of textbooks.
Most French people readily admit education provision is a valid concern, that it has been sadly lacking for some time. The state of French education is certainly the reason many of the protesters were out on the streets, including those I met in Strasbourg.
But while true, this fails to account for the sheer wanton scale of the destruction in the recent riots. The starkest irony concerns the Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes. Built in 2014, at a cost of 65 million euros, it’s one of France’s state-of-the-art high schools—with a soaring bioclimatic glass roof, landscaped gardens, amphitheatre, two gyms and a climbing wall. On 1 October, rioters burnt it down. The media, with a straight face, said it was burnt down in the name of under-resourced education provision.
Three Other Elements
The party line that the rioting is the work of disgruntled students fired up by nostalgic revolutionary zeal is partly true, but only partly. Three further groupings became involved and shaped outcomes:
1 Hard Left and Anarchists. The protests on 17 October were expanded from earlier student protests by the addition of populist ‘yellow jacket’ protestors and trades unions into a national day of action. They also drew vocal support from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the prominent French hard-left politician and leader of the La France Insoumise (LFI) party. A significant proportion of the new protesters on the 17th were hard-left agitators, and much of the graffiti reflected this. A common scrawl in Strasbourg was ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), a slogan popular with far-left and anarchist agitators. This phrase, tellingly in English, dovetails with the leftist call in the United States for the police to be defunded.
There’s a long tradition in Marxist and revolutionary circles of seeing violence as redemptive, particularly in France. The French revolutionary writer George Sorel wrote in his 1908 work Reflections on Violence that working-class violence was heroic and moral, a way to purify bourgeois society. Similarly, the phrase, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ comes from 18th century France. It’s particularly associated with Maximilien Robespierre, who oversaw the Reign of Terror when thousands of so-called enemies of the Revolution were guillotined, including Marie Antoinette. Violence is easily reframed as virtue when when it thinks it’s on the right side of history.
Meanwhile, actual working-class people are the ones sweeping up broken glass, boarding up windows, and rebuilding their shattered communities. And they will be paying for the repairs to public buildings and street furniture through their taxes.
2 Israel/Gaza. Most of the graffiti on 17 October reflected the current international preoccupation with Israel and Gaza. Watch almost any footage of the rioting: you will see countless black-and-white keffiyeh scarves being worn, and Palestine flags waved. The walls and billboards of Strasbourg, like other French cities, were covered in Free Gaza graffiti.
Whatever one’s views of the politics of the Middle East, one thing is unquestionable. The flag of Palestine and the keffiyeh have become the default symbols not only of opposition to Israel, but hatred of Western culture and heritage—which is seen as irredeemably arrogant, colonialist and bigoted. This fundamental despising of Western culture by a wide international cohort of young adults, and a cultural mood that sees its destruction as a virtuous cause, unquestionably fed into the protests.
More sinisterly, the next day French police released evidence that some rioters had on their person lists of addresses of Jewish-owned stores. In one Marseille street, Jewish-run businesses were set alight, while others weren’t. There is evidence that Islamists with an agenda of ‘globalising the Intifada’ latched onto the riots as a way of targeting Jews.
3 Disaffected Youth. A third group must not be forgotten. In French culture there’s a group of disaffected youth, particularly from the poorer suburbs of large cities, who are not particularly motivated by class politics or the rights of Palestine. They just love to burn cars, and get free stuff by looting shops. When their football teams loses, they riot and burn cars. When their team wins, they still riot and burn cars. When there are major street protests, they latch onto them for more opportunities to riot and burn cars.
The most traumatic footage from 17 October illustrates well the madness of crowds—amoral, driven by pure appetite, violent. In one clip, a masked youth faces a female shop owner who begs him not to loot her premises. Far from showing compassion to the pleading woman, he grips her so she can’t move while his friends invade her shop, loot the goods, and smash the place up. Then he lets her go.
This is a particularly sinister element to the riots. Many of the rioters seem genuinely indifferent to any underlying ideology at all—be it politics, social justice, the French Revolutionary spirit, or political Islam. They’re not motivated by any cause beyond the thrill of getting free stuff, and burning stuff. The more luxury the goods, the better. The grander and more imposing the buildings burnt, the more entertaining.
French Philosophical Roots
But even this volatile blend of hedonism and arson didn’t emerge from a clear blue sky. I’d argue this too has French roots, particularly in French philosophy. It might seem odd to link looters burning Volvos and nicking Hermès scarves to currents in scholarly philosophy. But it’s precisely trends in philosophy and worldview that filter down and establish a plausibility structure in which we all live.
France has a long and distinguished heritage of thinking and debating. But from the 1960s on, certain corrosive emphases took centre stage. To name just one, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers exactly 100 years before the recent riots. Foucault taught that what we think of as truth-claims are merely power-plays disguised as knowledge. All systems of truth are constructed by interest-groups, and used to govern and brutalise others.
French academics in corduroy jackets and turtlenecks like to debate ideas – as much as French youth in balaclavas and hoodies like to burn cars. In France, ideas such as Foucault’s remained as relatively harmless debating-points. But then they crossed the Atlantic. And American culture is impatient with intellectual ideas for their own sake (in 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter explored why in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life).
American Shoots
The ideas of Foucault and other French contemporaries took root in American universities in the 1980s, but American soil was different from French. America was a consumer society fascinated by the shaping and construction of personal identity. And it was a society carrying a burden of racial guilt. A wave of American writers applied Foucault’s idea of truth-claims-as-power to real-world areas such as identity, race and gender.
Institutions, cultures, traditions, faiths, identities: all became viewed as human constructs and masks for power. Truth claims: about power. Moral absolutes: about power. Factual statements about biological sex: about power. Interpreting the Bible: about power. Culture, history and national pride: about power. This is the heart of the philosophy exported from France, and McWeaponised in American universities from the 1980s on.
Truth, Beauty, Goodness
Through history, most cultures have seen Truth, and the search for Truth, as the pearl of great price, and considered Beauty and Goodness meaningful categories. Some of us still do. But in a world where Truth, Beauty and Goodness can never be more than opinions, we’re seen as dangerous imperialists. Haters.
It’s hard for today’s young adult to be gripped by a Truth bigger than their own inner psychodrama. It’s hard for them to see Beauty as more than an attack on somebody or something else. It’s hard for them to see Virtue as more than an morbid urge to control others. But a culture that deconstructs even the possibility of Truth, Beauty and Virtue is a dying culture. For this is nihilism, and nothing will come of nothing.
Turns out those masked youths who jeered and shouted ‘raciste!’ at an elderly man telling them they had no right to destroy property were living out core values of French philosophy, repackaged and reimported. Who was that old man to impose his regressive bourgeois values, his cultural imperialism, his hatred, on them? Fascist.
Revd Mike Starkey a London based writer and ordained Anglican minister who frequently works in France. He contributes to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought, and writes features on culture and faith at Flaneur Notes.
How quickly we forget our own riots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots#Police_shooting_of_Mark_Duggan
Duggan was a criminal with links to the drug world. A lot of people in London support that world. Today London is mainly non-white, so there is a racial element, too. But the Krays had their following in the East End in a previous generation.
“Today London is mainly non-white,”
That is incorrect. According to Wikipedia the population of Greater London is 53.6% white. I suspect that if were to consider the area from which London draws its working population, the proportion would be higher. Rich white people live in leafy commuter towns like Sevenoaks.
London is an international city. This gives it a vibe which many people love, especially the young.
It also happens to be the place in the UK where the Church is strongest among those in their 20s.
That was in 2021. Even then the white British population was under 38%. In 1961 London was 98% white.
Whatever the ‘vibe’ of London, it is now a decidedly un-English city in many ways. Similar things have been observed about Paris, Berlin and New York. Rapid immigration has transformed them thoroughly.
When you specify ‘white British’ is falls to as low as 35%. And the trend has continued since 2021.
The author hinted at, but gently detoured around, the R and I question: Race and Islam. The fact that looters yelled ‘Racist!’ at the shop owner remonstrating with them tells you what is going on.
A lot of the young rioters and thieves are of North African and West African background: they may have been born in France but their parents were immigrants, and their children seem to inhabit a shadow world that is neither properly France nor Africa. When you add the potency of social media and media-created communities, you have a ready catalyst for youth criminality.
It’s exactly what we have seen in London in recent years. Not long ago, a huge number of teenagers, mainly black girls, went on mass shoplifting in Clapham Junction, and a few years back, black teenage boys ransacked sports goods shops in London.
The targeting of Jewish businesses is obviously a focus of Muslim youths in France. We have seem the same targeting of Jews in England by jihadi-minded Muslims, and the relentless entry of young men from the Middle East will only continue until all the Jews give up and leave for Israel.
Katherine Birbalsingh, herself a former teacher of French, addressed the question of the school riots in France on her youtube channel last week, and she explained it as partly the inadequacies of French teaching methods and philosophy. But she had to tread carefully too. Her highly successful school was threatened by an Islamist-minded pupil (egged on by her father) who wanted to pressure her schoolmates into praying en masse in the playground. It took a court ruling to squash that idea.
In the end, all our problems are basically spiritual, aren’t they? The absence of living Christian faith in the lives of so many French people, especially the young, means that the baser instincts of human nature will come out.
I thank God for raising up a woman like Birbalsingh. Here she is talking to Triggernometry (the same who hosted the wonderful interview with Simon Sebag Monetefiore):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECcphe38KM
“[In our school] we allow them their different cultures. But there is one overarching culture that binds us together. And so we sing ‘God save the King’, we sing Jerusalem and ‘I vow to thee my country’. … Every year we are building up a sense of gratitude for the freedoms that we’ve got.’
Need to hear this in the context – 11 minutes of passionate wisdom, addressing the root cause of the malaise as a non-Christian. But there you have it, when she illustrates the overarching culture, it is to reference hymns that speak of God. Charlie Kirk is also discussed.
That’s why the question “What is behind the recent riots?” is relevant to a Christian blog site. Every church leader should be listening to voices like hers, working at the coalface, because she is pointing out what many still fail to recognise, that Western society has gone through a profound post-Christian revolution and those most affected are today’s children, irremediably indoctrinated in the oppressor/oppressed narrative by today’s secular madrasas.
Many of them just seem to be a bunch of thugs and thieves. Lock up the worst offenders (like the guy who used his home made flame-thrower in the face of a woman) and for the rest force them to do unpaid community service, by working to rebuild what they have destroyed. If they refuse, lock them up. Their parents should also face repercussions, if they live in France. For too long they have had the carrot of living on benefits etc. Now the stick is required.
Thank you Mark, an observation –
Your quote-
“A Parisian couple in their 80s standing shivering and vulnerable in the street in their underwear, as masked youths steal not only their phones and wallets but their clothes too.”
dailymail.com/news/article-16219929/Viral-elderly-couple-robbed-stripped-AI-France-riots.html
The image was viewed nearly six million times on X and was shared by several police unions as the country was overrun by rioters this weekend.
But there are major inconsistencies in the image and Google’s SynthID Detector indicated that it was AI generated.
Reports from French media also indicated the image was created using the technology.
There are several visual errors in the photo. Two ‘rioters’ were seen sharing the same pair of legs, while the elderly woman’s hand appears to be missing a finger.
On top of this, the faces of two people appear to be merged in the background, while another appears to be missing their bottom half. Passing the image through specialist software reveals the image has a watermark that indicates it was made or edited by a generative AI.
The initial image that was shared on social media indicated it was made using Google Gemini, while a variant of the picture that appeared to be ‘clearer’ was linked with OpenAI’s AI technology.”
More generally the French “psyche” is generally understood,
It’’s apparent genesis a Les Misserable glorification of revolution.
One commentator I read many years ago said that the same revolution might have occurred in the UK at that time had it not been for John Wesley and the Methodist enlightenment, The Overcomers cast out by the Established Church.
Could this type of spirit arise in this country ?
Perhaps in part it already is growing in our polarised Church and State.
How will a church respond that is already polarised ?
Will God raise up to us another “saviour” ?
Perhaps there needs to be a corporate fervent cry of
Hosanna! ? May our focus be sharpened. Shalom
I did think it odd they took their clothes!
Thanks for pointing out that the story of the old people having clothes stolen was fake. I’ve now removed it from the article! Mike
Although I’m now assured the story about the old people having their clothes stolen was true, and based on police records, but the photo of it happening that circulated on social media wasn’t genuine. D’oh!
oh, wow. Should we add the sentence back in?
Not before you have their names.
No, there’s so much doubt about it – I think leave it out. I haven’t seen the evidence for it being real, and that paragraph does what it needs to do without it.
One commentator I read many years ago said that the same revolution might have occurred in the UK at that time had it not been for John Wesley and the Methodist[s]
That claim originated with the French historian Élie Halévy (1870-1937), but he didn’t understand the differences between England and France. Voltaire praised England’s greater freedoms than pre-Revolutionary France. The English historian GM Trevelyan wrote that “if the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.” Parliamentary Reform and the revocation of the Corn Laws were all that was needed to quell the popular disturbances of the early 19th century in England.
It is perhaps more accurate to say that the French Revolution would not have happened had Louis XIV not thrown out the French protestants (the Huguenots) on pain of death in 1685 by abrogating the Edict of Nantes. That left only a Catholic church that was indifferent to the suffering of the people caused by a run of bad harvests in the 1780s. When taxes to support the bloated aristocracy became unpayable, the people faced a choice of starvation or uprising. Not a difficult choice.
That’s a good point about the Huguenots. France caused itself enormous harm by throwing out many thousands of industrious skilled and literate people who took their great abilities in weaving, winemaking, goldsmithing, banking etc to Protestant Europe and beyond. Besides delaying industrial development, it meant that politics was polarised into Catholicism v. anticlericalism, and intellectual life tending towards radicalism and atheism.
How many children from active Christian families, or close families, were rioting?
One may think what I always say about Christianity being excellent and secularism deadly and dangerous is by the by. It is of the highest importance and has the highest consequences.
The strikes are mainly driven by the far left in protest at cost of living and housing costs etc
Simon, Limoges Town Hall was not burnt to the ground as a protest of the cost of living.
and the irony that the millions of Euros of public money that will have to be spent for rebuilding and repair, and the raised costs of insurance will only lead to more costs put on the French.
It does, that is how the far left often does its protests, especially in France
…with ‘Palestine’ flags all around? Seriously?
Yes, the far left are also anti Israel
Two words the article never mentions: socialism and Muslims.
Socialism means the younger invariably get short-changed by the older. Retirement at 62 in a nation with below-replacement fertility means ever-fewer workers must support ever-more retirees (until the demographic collapse kicks in). The Far Left is eager to conceal this fundamental flaw in their system using education as a pretext, with the students indeed being so poorly educated they are incapable of understanding why. I need not dilate on the effect of adding millions of Muslims to the mix, a large number of whom have little interest in France or much hope of prosperity anywhere. In this case, one plus one sums to far more than two.
Few people want to face up to the reality of demographics…
but if there are fewer workers does that not mean less unemployment? And is their education so bad? France didnt do too badly on the recent Pisa scoring – it beat Norway. And how does forcing people to work as long as possible, only giving many just a few years to live before death, a good thing when by retiring they are leaving a vacancy to be filled?
More benefits mean more taxation. A very large part of France’s education budget actually goes on pensions.
The article is a very good one, and covers a lot of ground. Perhaps you should read it again?
Regarding ‘socialism’ the author writes: ‘A significant proportion of the new protesters on the 17th were hard-left agitators, and much of the graffiti reflected this. A common scrawl in Strasbourg was ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), a slogan popular with far-left and anarchist agitators. … There’s a long tradition in Marxist and revolutionary circles of seeing violence as redemptive, particularly in France.
Regarding Islam: ‘This fundamental despising of Western culture by a wide international cohort of young adults, and a cultural mood that sees its destruction as a virtuous cause, unquestionably fed into the protests. More sinisterly, the next day French police released evidence that some rioters had on their person lists of addresses of Jewish-owned stores. In one Marseilles street, Jewish-run businesses were set alight, while others weren’t. There is evidence that Islamists with an agenda of ‘globalising the Intifada’ latched onto the riots as a way of targeting Jews.’
Thanks for replying to the socialism and Islam point. As the author of the article, I was about to say exactly what you said, but then saw you’d done it for me!
Glad you found the article helpful. It’s already been reposted by lots of unexpected people, including the journalist Mark Urban (formerly of Newsnight), which I’m pleased about.
Your comment, like the article, fails to use the terms “socialism” and “Muslim”, just as I said. The quotes you select furthermore say nothing about the effects of socialism, only that Marxists see violence as redemptive. I said as much in my comment and moreover offered an explanation as to why. As to Muslims, the quote you select uses the intentionally misleading term “Islamist”, not “Muslim”, which implies that those “globalising the Intifada” are somehow distorting Islam rather than being, in fact, the truest disciples of Mohammed.
Perhaps you should read my comment again. As perhaps should the author of the article who responded to you.
I would like some *evidence* that the extreme Left and radical Muslims are behind this. That is my guess, but it can’t be more than a guess without hard evidence. I know Foucault about it.
An interesting comment. As I say in my article, look at the graffiti. Strasbourg, where I’m still working, is covered in hard left and radical Muslim graffiti. My reaction to that is: believe them when they tell you who they are. It’s like the Hamas attacks on Israel. Some Western progressives claim Hamas never committed slaughter in the most obscene ways imaginable, killed babies etc. If I were Hamas, I’d be furious at those Western progressives, given that they filmed it all so the world would know exactly what they did.
It’s possible that young rioters here in France write hard-left and Islamist graffiti and don’t really understand or mean it. But why would you use hard left and Islamist phrases, when you could equally well write ‘All you need is love’, or ‘Make love, not war’, as an earlier generation did? Even if it’s just youth following current trends, it’s telling that those trends are American-style left-wing militancy, and globalising the Intifada by all means necessary.
Katherine Birbalsingh’s youtube programme shows some white girls sitting in a church that is being mocked or desecrated, singing jihadi songs, including one glorifying the Bataclan murderers.
Some meme has definitely entered the mind of teenage French children, as their violent conduct of late indicates.
These arguments are why I believe you are right. But they are not evidence.
THIS is evidence – a list of the groups behind it all:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/whos-who-inside-frances-chaos-inc-franchise-communist-groups-labor-unions-global-activists
Ther is a small amount of American confusion in the text – the Gilets Jaune are not extreme left but populists, i.e. normal people who have had enough of the woke left. Nevertheless some hard work has gone into getting this information. And watch out for November 20th!
What happens on Nov 20th?
BTW, not a few commentators see the violence in France as the opening shots in the French Presidential election.
The subhead was: “Fox News Digital investigation identifies 54 groups behind France’s unrest as communists prepare a November youth strike”. The following website picks this up and runs with it – the same is due to happen across Europe on Nov 20:
https://jdrucker.com/frances-chaos-inc-exposed-as-the-global-islamo-marxist-franchise-launching-revolutions-with-plans-to-spread-to-12-nations/
Yes, we all see the problem[s] We all see the force and forces of evil
which were once predicted long ago “evil men shall wax worse
and worse” in the last days. The evidence gives the lie to
the humanists
belief that man is growing better,that Utopia beckons.
That “mens hearts shall fail them for fear”[ listen to any News-media]
We are constantly regaled with the term that “Britain is broken.
our ancient institutions are being undermined and pulled apart there are gaping gaps in our systems etc.
Such are the doom-loop doom-merchants.
Seeing all this God says in EZEK. 22:30 And I sought for a man
among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it,
but I found none.
Perhaps Google the motif of “Standing in the gap”in the Scriptures ?
Saviours are not all action men Neh. 9:27 –Obad. 1:21
And saviours shall come up on mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and the kingdom shall be the LORD’S.
“Call out the mighty men of war ! ” – the over comers, the Builders who overcome God Himself. Shalom.
Or perhaps a scan of “breach” in a concordance –
Ezek 26:10 By reason of the abundance of his horses their dust shall cover thee: thy walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots, when he shall enter into thy gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach, Cf. Isa 30:13
2 King 12:5 Let the priests take it to them, every man of his acquaintance: and let them repair the breaches of the house, wheresoever any breach shall be found.
Isa 58:12 And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. Shalom.
I think there’s a spiritual element to this violence in France, as well as philosophical.
Consider the massacre of the Protestants in the 16th Century – which had a profound effect on our own country, during the reign of Elizabeth 1st. And the violence has erupted sporadically ever since
The late David Pawson in the 1990s prophesied that Britain would become an Islamic state. At the time most church leaders failed to cope with the idea. In retrospect it looks far less implausible. We have a problem with Islam; the easy solution is to assume, with some evidence, that most Muslims are respectable people with ultimately a similar world view to our own. And then events like the pogrom against the teacher who showed an image of Mohammed and was forced into hiding occurs.
After the Reformation the English government had a similar problem with Catholicism. It chose the path of hoping they would integrate and prove to be trustworthy. By the 1800s this bet had proved correct and too many don’t understand why any restrictions were ever placed on Catholics (realise the Armada was a Papal crusade and perhaps you get the point). We’re choosing the same route to deal with Islam; are we right to do so?
‘More sinisterly, the next day French police released evidence that some rioters had on their person lists of addresses of Jewish-owned stores. In one Marseille street, Jewish-run businesses were set alight, while others weren’t. There is evidence that Islamists with an agenda of ‘globalising the Intifada’ latched onto the riots as a way of targeting Jews.’
Snopes is currently denying that there’s significant evidence of this:
‘According to Marseille police, the looting in Marseille had “no connection” to anti-Jewish hatred. “Businesses were targeted without any particular distinction,” a police spokesperson told Snopes in an email. Bruno Benjamin, president of the Marseille-area branch of the CRIF — a Jewish umbrella organization representing Jewish institutions in France — said on a French Jewish radio station on Oct. 19 that “all businesses were affected — whether Jewish, non-Jewish, or Muslim.”‘
https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/10/19/france-riots-synagogue-jewish-businesses/#Echobox=1792453684
Here is a list of the groups behind it all:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/whos-who-inside-frances-chaos-inc-franchise-communist-groups-labor-unions-global-activists
Ther is a small amount of American confusion in the text – the Gilets Jaune are not extreme left but populists, i.e. normal people who have had enough of the woke left. Nevertheless some hard work has gone into getting this information.
Wow, that is a phenomenal list…
Yes yes, we understand the nature and works of evil actors
destroying our Peace;
We are exhorted to overcome evil with Good, Rom. 12:21
What is the “good” that overcomes evil ? [ Answers on a “Post”card]
As Charles Spurgeon so eloquently argued in his 1876 sermon on the topic of overcoming evil with good, “You must either be overcome of evil, or you must yourself overcome evil; one of the two. You cannot let evil alone and evil will not let you alone. You must fight, and in the battle you must either conquer or be conquered.”
We are called to be more than conquers, to be “led around in victory”. Not children tossed about but prepared and destined to be
Men – Children whose destiny is to rule with Christ in his throne REV.3:21 “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.
REV. 2:26 “And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations:
2:27 And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.
Perhaps read the book of Obadiah [21 verses]
As a precept of how God of old deals with evil. Shalom.
Thank you for this very thoughtful overview of what is obviously a complicated situation. When looking at video of the riots the other night I was reminded of this scene a few years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=323MpjYoQxE
Thanks for this Bruce. So important to not give in to the catastrophe approach to what was clearly a grim and terrifying situation for those caught up in it.
It’s not so long since we had similar scenes in some of our own cities and London used to be well known for its mob violence, long before Marx and post-modernist philosophers.
Helpful analysis here too:
https://youtu.be/x_Si3U2BR5U?is=vjowcEC-ydl0Myg7
Thanks for this article Mike on the depressing scenes of violence in France last weekend.
There’s a helpful further discussion on BBC Radio 4’s The Briefing Room at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00333cg
It highlights the long term economic challenges that it seems France won’t face realistically e.g. over pensions, welfare, defence and taxation. (Sound familiar?)
Two other observations: when famers in my area became very angry over the Government’s plan to introduce Inheritance Tax on farmland they joined national protests in Westminster and let their feeling be known very forcefully. But they didn’t use violence or see the police as the enemy and would have been horrified if their protest had become an attack on the police. French police do seem to behave more as a paramilitary force than a civilian one and in this instance appear to have used some very heavy-handed tactics which inflamed the situation.
Also, I wonder if we reach for the constellation of ‘post-modernist philosophy/ atheism/ Foucault/ Marxism/ Muslim radicalisation’ as an explanation a bit too quickly. I suspect that some longer term analysis will tell a picture that is more nuanced. I am more anxious about the frontal attack on truth, respect, courtesy and open debate by the political leaders of the USA which is in danger of infecting culture here in Europe, even in our churches. And that attack hails from the far right not from the extreme left and often expresses itself in anger, ridicule and immediate put downs.
More positively, only a few weeks ago huge numbers of young people were out on the streets of Paris to greet the Pope and he was pointing them to truth and beauty. Let’s not despair or lose hope.
What you call the Far Right are merely reacting in growing exasperation to several decades of being ignored or called racists for expressing their concern about multiculturalism and especially the rise of Islam, which has been foisted on them by the immigration policies of Prime Ministers and Presidents without mention in election manifestos, by both Left (multiculturalism dogma) and Right (cheap immigrant labour). Have you ever looked into what Muslims themselves say about multiculturalism?
You deplore the reaction of the Populists (which is just the Latin word corresponding to the Greek ‘democracy’) without ever bothering to to analyse what they are reacting against or why. Poor show.
I don’t think I used the term Populist, and the right wing agenda I did mention was one that I see most aggressively expressed by the political elite in the USA, people such as Steve Bannon; I don’t think they’re ‘merely reacting’ but have a well thought out and deliberate long term strategy. Nor did I mention Muslims. I agree that when we’re ignored we can react in exasperation/ anger, but my sense is that many groups at present feel that way and are claiming that they’re being ignored, on the left and right, young and old, Muslims, Christians and Jews. At present no-one feels that things are working for them and claim that other groups are being favoured over them. And we can all (myself included) be tempted into a nostalgic view of how things used to be at some point in the past – when we were younger and felt optimistic maybe. But rather than buy into that victim approach I think we help ourselves more by being less reactive and more courteous, less willing to indulge in put downs and more willing to listen attentively. But violence, quick judgements and anger damage our souls and so often achieve nothing.
Yes but there is abundant evidence of 2-tier policing agasint those who complain about certain immigrants and their behaviour. I am not going to let you drag this discussion into the sand of “all groups are as bad as each other”. They are not.