The spectacle of a France in flames, vandalized and looted that went around the world on October 17 is not only the result of a student demonstration overwhelmed by a handful of hotheads or infiltrators.
Yes, at first, like every return to school, students mobilized to demand educational improvements. On this occasion, the replacement of absent teachers, greater investment in facilities, cutting the length of the school day or eliminating Parcoursup, the reviled platform for admission to public universities, accused of opacity and discrimination.
So far, nothing new, even in its excesses, such as the blockade of institutes, the barricades or some bonfires with provocative slogans. After all, this is the country of French May and revolutionary tradition is part of its DNA. Furthermore, for these adolescents, a mock insurrection functions as a rite of passage to adulthood, a folklore that is repeated every year under the condescending gaze of parents, teachers, and the media. But this time, quickly, the protest took another turn, not only due to the level of violence, but also due to its protagonists, their political articulation and the premeditation of the destruction.
The initial student demand was joined on Saturday by the yellow vest movement, peripheral France, which has long dreamed of a resurrection. The fight for purchasing power, in a context of rising prices due to the war in Ukraine and the Middle East (the cost of gasoline skyrocketed), unified discontent against the unpopular president Emmanuel Macron, who faces a public debt close to 119% of GDP and the Government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who needs to approve a budget that contains the deficit.
The legitimization of violence
The student demands were progressively eclipsed. On Tuesday, former climate change, Black Lives Matter champion, two-time Gaza flotilla passenger and globetrotter with no known income, Greta Thunberg, appeared at the Paul-Eluard Institute in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to express her support for the students. What was the now pro-Palestinian activist doing here?
Seine-Saint-Denis is the department of metropolitan France with the highest proportion of immigrants and children of immigrants: both groups accounted for around 63% of its population, according to official data from 2020-2021. The mayor of the commune of Saint-Denis is Bally Bagayoko, current star of the far-left party France Insoumise (LFI). Leader and presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon sees both him and his constituency as the symbol of what he calls "the new France", the young and "racialized" electorate captive of LFI.
Bagayoko is photographed in his office with a huge Palestinian flag. He has taken down the portrait of President Macron, present in the town halls of France as a republican symbol, to leave it on the ground. In these days, as the protests hardened, Bagayoko declared that "violence, at a given moment, can be legitimate," although he specified that it was "better to avoid it." Similarly, her party's MEP, Rima Hassan, stated after October 7, 2023 that the Hamas pogrom constituted a "legitimate action."
The omnicause
From LFI, the discourse according to which street violence is a natural response to "true systemic and institutional violence" has become recurrent. Its leaders add fuel to the fire in an irresponsible strategy of chaos in the name of "the convergence of struggles." They can count on the collaboration of the antifa shock groups and the black blocks, always ready to destroy, masked, businesses and institutions. Only then do suburban youth appear, out of pure opportunism, often of Maghrebi and sub-Saharan origin. Although they are dressed completely in black like the anti-system, they look for the external symbols of capitalist wealth; They loot Louis Vuitton, Céline, Dior, Sephora, Apple Stores, while the previous ones destroy city halls, such as Limoges or Marseille, or the historic tourist office of Lyon. Note that no bookstore was looted despite complaints about school supplies and shortages.
It is curious how, among the posh, white and guilty kids of the Latin neighborhood high schools, among the "racialized" poor youth of the suburbs or in the ultra-left groups and the representatives of LFI, the Palestinian flag is omnipresent (and the French one absent), although the link of the Middle East with the school demand is factually non-existent.
The "Palestinian cause" has become "the omnicause", the supposed "intersectional" struggle in which environmentalism, feminism, LGBT rights, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism coexist. This absurd common denominator actually combines European self-hatred of progressivism and postcolonial resentment. Thus, the students' original demands were instrumentalized to become something else, a platform against the West.
Six months before the presidential elections, LFI is betting on radicalization that polarizes society enough to force a second round with Marine Le Pen's National Rally. Meanwhile, thanks to her adversaries, she campaigns without lifting a finger.
