By Staff
“French culture doesn’t exist in and of itself; there is no such thing as a single French culture. There is culture in France and it is diverse.” – French President Emmanuel Macron, 2017
INTRODUCTION
A statue of Joan of Arc stands just outside the French city of Toulouse. During the course of a series of protests and riots in cities across France, an African supporter of Hamas festooned the statue in hijab attire and affixed the Palestinian flag to her.
Joan of Arc was the woman who turned the tide for the French in the Hundred Years’ War with the English. From the French perspective, the war was about the pervasive occupation of French territory by the English. The French had suffered innumerable defeats and saw the flower of their nobility slain in pointless slaughter until a girl came forward and led the French to victory at Orléans.
She would later be captured by the English and burned at the stake for heresy, but the French both vanquished the English and became a nation, thanks mostly to St. Joan.
The symbol of the French nation, St. Joan, who beat back the colonizers, the English, was now being colonized herself, this time by a coalition of violent opportunists, all looking to destroy the French identity, for a variety of reasons (and all of them treason).
This week, the two stories that dominated our wires were the now-growing riots in Europe and the 2026 midterm elections.
Last week, our Deep Dive, Planvasion EU, introduced you to the events that led up to the French protests/riots, as well as its spread into other countries. This week, we were not planning on revisiting this topic so soon, but we believe the events in France are devolving faster than we would have predicted.
For that reason, we are going to go a little deeper on a part of last week’s Deep Dive, and that part is the French Riots.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
We started our Deep Dive with a quote by Emmanuel Macron, who claimed, “French culture doesn’t exist in and of itself; there is no such thing as a single French culture. There is culture in France and it is diverse.”
If we break that down so that a child can understand it, it reads like this: There is no one culture; there are many cultures, though no shared culture. This is balkanization disguised as “diversity.”
If there is no French culture, there is no France, and that appears to be what the people rioting on the streets want to see happen. Judging from Macron’s quote, one wonders what he is even opposed to. He’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the insurrectionists.
As we reported in last week’s MIA, these riots most likely started spontaneously as student protests. But that quickly changed when the opportunists moved in, all united by a single cause, bringing about the end of the French identity and, by extension, the French state.
When the trouble started, the well-funded organizers moved in, from Islamists to progressives to anarchists and more. Anyone with bad credit or a criminal record might be inclined to join a mob that could destroy records which continue to indict them.
The progressive state press has gone to great lengths to paint the protests/riots as the fruit of unaffordability, not the fruit of progressivism and/or the immigration of Islamists who hate France. Unaffordability is a factor, but mostly when it comes to the protesting, not the riots.
The Islamist converting St. Joan to Islam was not protesting unaffordability; he was seeking to hasten the fall of the republic and the rise of a sharia state.
Our Deep Dive will begin with a quick recap of the events that brought us to this week, as well as a summary of the key events that have happened this past week. Then we will look at the actors in this drama, the ones on the street and the ones behind the ones on the street.
We will give you some bellwether examples of progressive state media protection. We will highlight key responses to the riots so far. We will cover the spread of these riots to other countries, like Italy, Greece, and Belgium. We will conclude our Deep Dive with an assessment of the unrest so far.
A. RECAP OF EVENTS
The events we see in France today were not triggered by students; they were triggered by teachers. Around mid-September, teachers in a Paris suburb began protesting the poor conditions and resources of the education system. By early October, as many as 8,000 people were arrested, with 86% of them being minors.
The protests had already turned violent, with the teachers and students now beginning to be joined by Islamist and progressive adults. The peak of the activity so far came on October 17, with a mix of riots and protests exceeding 800,000 participants across 110 separate locations. In Paris, there were 110,000 protestors and rioters alone.
On that day, 1,500-plus vehicles were set on fire, and an historic town hall was burned to the ground. There were 2,000-plus arrests and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. This all happened on one day. Since then, curfews have been announced, restrictions were introduced, but the protests and riots continue.
B. THE LATEST
Despite bans and curfews, the violence continued this week. At one point, rioters threatened to take the Marseilles town hall, screaming “We’re taking the Bastille!”
The city of Limoges saw its historic Hotel de Ville burned to the ground. The people who set it on fire were caught on video. They all had masks on.
French President Emmanuel Macron went before the French people and declared, “Those who looted will have to pay for the damage, and those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable.”
It is the first time the authorities officially acknowledged that these “riots” were far bigger than student protests, and the intention was (and is) nothing short of bringing down the French Republic.
One pattern that is being seen is that the shops being destroyed (2,000-plus and counting) don’t include Islamist-owned shops.
France’s Interior Minister tendered his resignation in the wake of the failure of the French government to protect its citizens from insurrectionists. Macron declined the “offer.”
However the protests started, it is increasingly difficult not to acknowledge the violence being driven primarily by the progressive-Islamist alliance. Yet, thanks in large part to the progressive state press, the French people are divided on who is to blame for that same violence. Some still blame the students, for instance.
Macron announced plans to change tactics in dealing with the rioters. Specifically, he will be deploying “massive” forces against the rioters. That force will include French soldiers. 1,000 military troops are to be deployed in Paris alone this Saturday, October 24, a day they anticipate will see planned attacks.
They have also banned protests officially and announced other restrictions.
An NFL game in Paris on Sunday is still, as of now, going on as scheduled, but the American press isn’t so keen on going along for the ride given the unstable conditions.
C. THE ACTORS
A Fox News Digital investigation has, so far, identified 54 organizations that are actively supporting the riots in France. Of those 54 organizations, 16 are actual student groups. Among those student groups are Communist and Islamist groups. Outside of the youth, the remaining organizations are far-left groups, including the infamous “Yellow Vests,” who’ve led other violent riots and protests.
From The CounterPoint Blog:
“The protests in France have attracted support within extreme-left milieus across Europe, including before October 17. German platforms have translated French revolutionary texts discussing barricades and sabotage. Italian activists have discussed the influence of the French unrest on domestic protests.
“In Belgium, the activist platform Stuut circulated French texts praising attacks on police, burning barricades, and looting. In Spain, Izquierda Revolucionaria, a revolutionary socialist organization, urged students to follow the French example through strikes and school blockades. In Greece, revolutionary socialist activists called for a solidarity demonstration and praised confrontations with police.
“These developments show how protest narratives, calls for mobilization, and messages supporting political violence currently spread across Europe. Earlier CEP research has already documented cross-border cooperation among violent extreme-left networks. Whether the current protest wave will lead to joint planning or coordinated violent attacks remains unclear.”
Not only did the riots lead to far-left insurgents joining in, but they also spread their progressive jihad to other European countries (and hope to add America to the list).
Some of the French “Humanitarian Aid” Organizations supporting the riots were recently indicted for embezzling millions of dollars to the terror organization Hamas, the same organization Joan of Arc was recently pressed into joining.
Islamists on the ground are already well funded by the French government through social welfare programs, so all they have to do is join in the riots. There are numerous videos of Islamists engaging in violent action against buildings and people alike. One Islamist was caught on video yelling to the police, “In the name of Allah, we will kill them all!”
One video showed numerous Islamist insurrectionists brandishing AK-47s and submachine guns. The video shows the Islamists proudly flexing their wares as they prepare to escalate the insurrection (or so it seems).
Islamists aren’t the only violent insurrectionists. A French woman with a baby was threatened with rape. She was informed she would be “collateral damage” in the name of the revolution. Her aggressors appear to be far-left insurrectionists, not Islamists. They accused her of being a “dirty bourgeois.” She claimed, “With my infant in an apartment I was driven out of because I was told they were going to rape me.”
D. MEDIA PROTECTION
Here are four headlines that bellwether the progressive state press narratives on the French riots:
- FACT FOCUS: Trump and Republicans blame France’s immigrants for riots without evidence – AP News – This headline asks Americans not to believe their lying eyes, the hundreds of thousands of videos showing African and Middle Eastern men praising Allah while they unleash hell on French citizens.
- France has a proud tradition of protesting, and sometimes people lose their heads – abcnews.com – This headline attempts to make a somewhat grim joke; though the lesser context, the disproportionate outrage version of “lose their heads,” is their punchline, not the French Revolution. The article is accusing people of being hysterical for reacting with existential concern about what’s going on in France right now.
- France: Protests “brought the entire population together for a common purpose”– France 24 – This French publication is all-in on the riots, even attempting to popularize the riots by claiming everyone is participating in them. We wonder how the French citizens who are not in on the insurrection feel about this headline
- Looters Seize on massive French protests to raid and vandalize shops – France 24 – This is that same treasonous French press protecting the insurrection again. This headline is attempting to shift all the blame for the violence not on the politically motivated insurrectionists aiming to destroy the republic, but on “selfish looters.”
The French press has decided that “far right” candidates noticing the riots and the Islamists’ roles in the riots is problematic, even racist.
MS Now may take the case. Their mouthpieces decided to implore Americans to protest (meaning riot) here like they are in France over our economic woes. Not only are they pushing the narrative that this is an unaffordability protest, but they are also openly trying to trigger similar French-styled arsonist attacks against American businesses.
E. THE RESPONSE
Macron’s national speech did little to quell the riots, and its fecklessness, some suggest, might be the undoing of his “centrist” coalition in the upcoming elections. His speech was mostly viewed as mealy-mouthed and almost apologetic. Confidence in the “centrist” ending the cycle of violence is low.
The right-leaning candidate in the upcoming election, Marine Le Pen, has been using the riots to emphasize the importance of ending “decades of anarchic immigration.” Her party has risen in popularity as these protests and riots continue.
The far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was egging on similar acts of violence in the name of revolution. Now, he is only fanning the flames further.
From the Hungarian Conservative:
“Mélenchon praised the protesters’ ‘very great political and trade-union maturity’, promised to abolish the Parcoursup university admissions platform and reiterated his demand to lower the voting age to 16. The students insisted that they were not being manipulated by Mélenchon or his party, France Unbowed (LFI).
“At the same rally, he outlined his plan to replace the Fifth Republic with a Sixth Republic, tied to his vision of a ‘New France’ shaped by mass immigration and ‘creolization’ rather than traditional French assimilation and national identity.
“Arguing that the country’s demographic and cultural transformation requires a new political order, he proposed a sweeping constitutional overhaul, including citizens’ referendums and the power to recall elected officials, alongside expanded welfare and ecological regionalization.”
He made it very clear that he hopes to dissolve the French identity in favor of the ecumenical progressive state identity.
When President Trump blamed the riots on immigration, Emmanuel Macron called his claims “stupid.” He pushed the unaffordability narrative, blaming Trump’s Iran War for the rise in prices. He and every progressive (including American ones) alleged THAT was the trigger for the riots.
The Chinese are studying the riots, both to see how they might spread to other European countries (and probably how they can help facilitate that) and what lessons they can learn should the French and other European nations successfully quell the insurrection.
Progressive state representative Ro Khanna of California responded to a U.S. official claiming leftists and Islamists are behind the violent riots. He claimed, “He’s wrong to make it about the left wing… I think that we have to look at what is the cause, initially, of the discontent in this country? Why are there so many protests of young people around the world? Because the price of oil has gone up, gas has gone up, diesel has gone up, they don’t think schools are being funded.”
It’s not about insurrectionists wanting to bring down the republic; it’s about unaffordability. Just like the U.S. midterm elections aren’t about Democratic Socialists wanting to destroy the republic, it’s about affordability. It’s not about an international progressive state movement intending to replace many nation-states with one global state; it’s about affordability.
Make a note of how often the international progressive state press and leftist leaders worldwide are aligned with their progressive “American” counterparts.
F. THE SPREAD
It is likely that we will be following up this Deep Dive with an in-depth report on the revolutions brewing across all of Europe, especially if some of these spillovers from France turn into something more.
So far, there have either been violent riots or there are alleged planned violent riots in Greece, Italy, Belgium, and Spain. Spain has already had riots, but in response to the leftists and Islamists. Now, expect counter-riots from those same leftist and Islamist groups.
England has been having its own unrelated unrest. We expect more unrest connected to the French movement to happen soon.
Even America is under threat, as we have already documented DSA members being caught planning a similar action on November 10.
Italy has been very aggressive so far in dealing with rioters, preventing the mass arsons we’ve seen in France. Greece’s movement is, for now, mostly students, and is still mostly centered in Athens.
ASSESSMENT
In the course of human history, we have created a multiplicity of governance models, and nearly every governance model was designed to serve a particular ethnic group. Even in the case of empires with diverse ethnicity, there was, far more often than not, a ruling ethnicity.
The Roman Empire may have come closest to sustaining a governance model that wasn’t primarily serving the interests of ethnic Romans. Like “American” has become, “Roman” had become by the end of the western part of the Empire, an ideational ethnicity, not a biological one.
In the course of human history, we have created a multiplicity of governance models, almost all of which were, at most, regional in scale, not universal. Outside of the spiritual universal state, the nation, the Kingdom, the Empire, etc., had no ambitions to conquer the world to fulfill their grand missions.
The Christian Kingdom of God is not a universal state; it’s a universal spiritual fellowship. Vedic religions like Buddhism and Hindu variants have universal spiritual states as well (at least many versions do), but no calls to manifest that universality through one universal state.
Islam rose in the 7th century, with a war mandate: conquer the world by force and usher in the final days, which would then deliver paradise to all true believers. They are the first well-known (possibly first overall, but we’ll allow for obscure sects that never rose to prominence to have come before them) example of a belief system not merely justifying, but compelling, its acolytes to conquer the world and create a universal state.
Outside of Islam, no other popular religion or political system called on the creation of a universal state until the rise of social ideologies in the West. They started to emerge as recognizable groups in the 18th century. By the 19th century, they were fully formed.
Initially, the social ideologies appealed to the weak to vanquish the strong. They promised heaven on earth after violent purges of the undesirables, the strong, all in the name of the claim that humans could finitely know the ideal social and build and manage structures to both create and preserve it.
In most of their systems, they identified a key necessity to bring heaven on earth, conquer the world to create one universal state. Only with one universal state could the social ideal of humanity be created and preserved (by any means necessary, of course).
The 19th century saw these same people (those who fetishize the weak, demonize the strong, and offer a false hope of heaven through an ideal managed social) begin to “question” the nation-state model (which itself was relatively newly created).
These people came to be called leftists because of the French Revolution, where the terms of modern “politics” were formed. The ones championing a universal state through an ideal managed social sat on the left side of the French National Assembly. The ones championing the ethnic-centered kingdom with an Empire sat on the right side of the National Assembly.
Left became synonymous with fetishizing the weak and demonizing the strong, then with dissolving individual nation-states in favor of the universal state. Right became synonymous with fetishizing the strong, demonizing the weak, and defending the ethnic-centered nation-state.
By the end of the 19th century, the “right” developed its own social ideology, one that promised access to an understanding of an ideal social, as well as the means to make that happen. They also justified violence as a means of creating their own heaven on earth.
But the right never championed a universal state. They did, however, continue to preserve the old governance model of majority-ethnic-dominant states.
In the 20th century, the two social ideologies clashed. After a right-wing social ideology, Nazism, was defeated in part by a left-wing social ideology, communism, Europe, the source of the right-wing social ideology, began seeking a way to “free itself” from the shackles of ethnic nation-states. It sought the creation of a region-based state no longer limited by ethnic majorityism.
Yet even within that European project, universal state movements flourished (as they continue to do to this day).
Right-wing social ideologies are rarely, if ever, universal state projects. They are bounded to a region, the region that best serves the majority ethnicity in that project. The Nazis were attempting to create an ideal social that served “Aryans” within fixed borders that would allow them to dominate the world without being compelled to conquer all of it.
Even in America, right-wing social ideologies, like many versions (not all) of “Christian Nationalism,” specifically hope to create a limited nation-state for their assumed superior or rightful ethnic group.
The EU project, which began in 1951 but became the official “European Union” in 1993, has consolidated considerable European power in its institutions, but not so much that ethnic-majority-based nation-states within it have dissolved.
France is still, primarily, an ethnic-majority nation-state despite being one of the leaders of the EU, a project designed to dissolve the ethnic-majority nation-state altogether.
In other Western nations like America, Australia, and Canada, the ethnic-majority essentialism isn’t so essential to their identities. In all three of these cases, there are no ethnic versions of their nation-state names. There is no ethnic American, Australian, or Canadian.
Even if in all three cases the initial ethnicity could be categorized as “white,” or “European,” there were, in all instances, early exceptions to those assumptions. Even the “whites” within these nations held on to ethnic identities that often competed with other white ethnic identities. The French in America had no more love for the English in America than the French in France had for the English in England.
But in Europe, which was attempting to create something like the American Federal model through the EU project (where nation-states became states and the ethnic divide became less essential), the ethnic-majority nation-state persisted.
So, they brought in recruits to help accelerate the destruction of the ethnic-majority nation-states of Europe, people who brought with them a universal state model. These people were the Islamists, the “natural” frenemies of Western leftism wherever and whenever they confronted Western ethnic-majority nation-statism.
In America, ethnic-majority-essentialism is fringe, even among “conservatives,” the “right” in this country. Yet America still largely continues to hold to the essentialism of a non-universal nation-state, not a universal one.
America’s neighbors to the south are mostly dominated by universalist social ideologies, communists, socialists, democratic socialists, etc. The leftists in America hope to destroy the republic and make America the launchpad for the conquest of the world in the name of their social ideology,
Under Biden, they opened their borders to allow those predisposed to universalist state thinking, with no allegiance to the American state, to conquer through chaos the Americans still holding on to the non-universalist model.
In Europe, within their borders were plenty of “socialists” and plenty of universalist staters among the natives, but it still wasn’t enough to shatter the ethnic-majority non-universalist nation-states, the member states of the EU.
So, they aggressively imported Islamists, frenemies, who had only one thing in common with Western leftism: an appeal to the creation of a worldwide state. The Islamists call it a caliphate; the leftists call it the global state.
They were so desperate to destroy their own native nation-states that they imported people they know, deep down, will kill them next (if they can) after the two join together to defeat their common enemy, the non-universalist nation-state.
Now, the Islamists and the leftists (which we mostly call progressives, even though some groups would bristle at that term) sense a chance to topple governments and install their own power. They plan to exapt (repurpose) the nation-state mechanisms of power to build their universal state. As soon as the non-universalists are dead, the Islamists and Progressives will begin their wars against one another, for in the universalist state model there can be only one font of power.
Worldwide, every nation-state with leftists in it is a potential future province of the universal state. Every nation-state with Islamists in it is a potential future province of the Islamic caliphate. Among both Islamists and leftist universalists, however, there are competing claims to central authority.
The “American” left sees itself as the future ecumenical steward of the universal state, even as it allies itself with Europe and China, both of which see THEMSELVES as the rightful ecumenical stewards of the universal state.
On the Islamic side, their story is as divided as the left’s, meaning any victory over the non-universalists will be followed by decades, or more, of bloody wars as the universalists fight to be the last universalist standing.
France has become the current bellwether of this struggle, the struggle few clearly discuss, the struggle between the universalist nation-stater and the non-universalist nation-stater. That conversation has largely been avoided by the left’s claims to be anti-nationalists. They rarely define their universal state, or even talk about it, outside of intimate de facto war councils that are mostly held in tax-funded university rooms.
Like the atheist who avoids belief accountability by pretending a belief in non-god or a position of “agnostic” is somehow not belief because they have no god, the leftist avoids this very clear debate by pretending to be against nation-states altogether.
At one point, leftists were non-ethnic-majority essentialists; they have since become ethnic-majority essentialists after they created, out of their own imaginations, a two-raced humanity: the “whites” (who are devils that invented evil) and the POCs (people of color, the noble non-whites).
The only major leftist faction that hasn’t adopted the “woke” justification for power (the white devil’s terrorism on humanity) is China, but China has become, officially, an ethnic-majority-essential project, with their ethnicity of choice being the Han Chinese. China is becoming more of a rightist social ideology than a leftist one, even now appealing to the strong, the Han, to vanquish the weak, the non-Han.
They are also not championing a universal state, but rather, like the Nazis, are hoping to be the hegemon for a world that will serve as vassals to the beacon of humanity, the Han socialist state.
The very symbol of the ethnic-majority-essential French nation-state has become Joan of Arc, the woman who saved France from the colonizing English. She appealed as much to her French nationalism as her God when rallying men to her banner.
The symbol of Joan of Arc being “pressed” into Hamas membership might one day be remembered as the sign the French nation-state, the non-universal state, would soon die, or it might be the symbol that galvanizes what’s left of the French people to rise up and take their country back from both the Islamists and the self-hating leftist natives.
We don’t pretend, just yet, to know how this will play out, but we do recognize that the actions in France have brought this debate-by-violence to the fore, making the question of nation-states versus the universal nation-state a lot easier to ask and a lot harder to avoid.
The battle on the streets of France is between the French people who still hold to their national ethnic identity and those who want to destroy it. The battle on the streets of France is also, more importantly, between the universalist nation-staters and the non-universalist nation-staters.
On the side of the universalists are frenemy factions, all presuming they will be the last one standing after the violent wars end. These wars are sure to follow wherever they successfully defeat the non-universalists in the nation-state they are attacking.
The French state stands on the precipice of existence. The response by the non-universalists needs to be total and clear, making this a clear fight between one nation-state and many nation-states. So long as we continue to allow universalist nation-staters to hide behind the lie that they are against the nation-state model, we cannot rally people to our cause like they can theirs.
So long as people don’t understand the existential stakes of losing to the left and the Islamists, they will not feel compelled to take the dangerous risks necessary to defeat them. Let us pray the French people find their courage and their tongues so they can rally the decisive resistance needed to vanquish a psychotic, bloodthirsty enemy who believes you can murder your way to heaven.
Will Joan of Arc be the last cry of a dying French nation or the rally cry of its restoration? We have a strong feeling that as France goes, so too will most, if not all, of Western Europe, including Britain, go.
FURTHER RESOURCES:
Joan of Arc: A Study of Faith, Politics, and Sanctity in Fifteenth-Century France – Helen Castor
The Oxford History of the French Revolution – William Doyle
A Brief History of France – Cecil Jenkins
Islamizing Europe: Is the Conquest Inevitable? – World Encounters Institute
