The French Rioters Are Destroying What the Nazis Never Could

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

You may not have heard of Limoges; it’s the 30th most populous city in France. It’s one of those corners of Europe that has tons of history — going back to the Romans — that most tourists visiting the country never get to see.

 

Limoges’s town hall — Hôtel de Ville — was inspired by the city hall in Paris, with construction beginning in 1879, and it opened in 1883. As described by the New York Times, the building is “a jewel of late-19th-century French architecture; the building featured a metal bell tower, ornate details on its facade, and mosaic portraits of local figures. At the start of World War II, the monument hosted exiled Belgian lawmakers after Belgium surrendered to Nazi Germany.”  When the Times writes “hosted,” they mean the remaining and legitimate Belgian government moved and worked there while the collaborationist government in Brussels went about the business of rounding up the Jews. Outside Limoges’s town hall, “Belgian flags flew alongside French ones.”

 

France surrendered to the Nazis on June 22, 1940. The terms of the surrender allowed some portions of the southern half of France to remain under French civil administration. The city was initially in the “Free Zone” in the south during the Nazi invasion of France. But the Nazis launched a complete military occupation of France in 1942 and occupied the city. The town hall building was a key location for the French Resistance:

 

During the German occupation of France, Limoges Town Hall became a stronghold and a key center of Resistance activity in the southern unoccupied zone. Lucien Berdasé, head of the military affairs office and later the census bureau, became an indispensable ally to the Resistance. His efforts were wide-ranging: he sabotaged lists of Jewish residents, issued fake certificates for departures to Germany, hid weapons stored at the Town Hall, forged birth certificates, and established a regional network for producing false documents. He also provided safe passage and travel permits for Maquis (resistance fighter) vehicles, with the support and complicity of Laporte, the prefecture’s secretary-general. Suzanne Rodi-Boyer, who oversaw food ration card distribution at the Town Hall, also contributed to the Resistance by creating false papers for Jewish families using stamps stolen from the municipality.

 

When the Nazis rolled into town, they took over the local factory to produce aircraft engines and built an air raid shelter underneath the train station that was reserved for the Wehrmacht. The U.K. Royal Air Force bombed an arms factory in Limoges in February 1944.

 

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was 24 miles down the road from Limoges. On June 10, 1944 — just four days after the Allied forces landed at Normandy — German Waffen-SS troops surrounded Oradour-sur-Glane and massacred 642 men, women, and children before burning the village to the ground. A bit more than two months later, on August 21, 1944, Limoges was liberated by the French Resistance.

 

The building survived two world wars intact. The city hall looked like this, until Saturday.

 

(Benjamin Smith/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

The rioters destroyed what the Nazis didn’t, firebombing the city hall, bringing the bell tower crashing down, and burning large chunks of it to ashes.

 

“‘Today, the entire facade and the historic front section have been almost 100 percent destroyed,’ Maurice Barate, the top official for the region, announced on national television. Mr. Barate said that firefighters had been disadvantaged by the wind, and that the city hall’s wooden roof had ‘collapsed onto the rest of the building.’”

 

Allegedly, the riots gripping France are about school quality or income inequality, but anyone with eyes and ears knows that’s all nonsense. These crimes are perpetuated by angry young men who want a chance to loot, steal, hurt people, and burn things.

 

You don’t build better schools by firing a makeshift flamethrower in a random woman’s face. You don’t create economic opportunities by looting Louis Vuitton, Hermes, and Apple stores.

 

One more bitter irony: “Limoges is often called la Ville rouge, or the Red City. Mostly it’s because of the city’s long tradition of labor activism and left-wing politics, which also earned it another sobriquet, the ‘Rome of socialism.’” You see how much those left-wing politics counted when masked protesters who had torched a police car outside the town hall barged in to set the building on fire. City employees were still inside when they set the fire.

 

When the forces of anarchy and chaos come, nobody cares about your voting record. You’re just another target.

 

The riots have nothing to do with fairness or opportunity or the cost of living. They are about power. Right now, on too many streets in too many cities across France, the rioters have the power, and the forces of law and order do not.

 

The rioters in France aren’t Nazis, but their modus operandi isn’t that different: attack innocent people, take what they want, burn symbols of the old regime to the ground. They’re ransacking synagogues and burning Jewish businesses, so I think the rioters and the Nazis have some other shared interests as well.

 

We get the word “savage” from French, meaning “wild, untamed, strange, pagan” and also “cruel.” The rioters can accurately be labeled savages.

 

A lot of online discourse, including that of our president, contends that these riots are a result of French immigration policies. No doubt there are a bunch of Palestinian flags flying around — boy, recognizing the Palestinian state did France a whole lot of good, huh? — but we should not overlook the role of the French hard-left. From Sky News:

 

The student-led protests in France have become increasingly politicized, with politicians from the party France Unbowed seeking to present themselves as allies and patrons.

 

As we’ve been reporting, the party’s leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the party’s mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, have prominently weighed in over the day.

 

The party was founded in 2016 by Melenchon, a former journalist, who has since become the face of the French hard left, compared to Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

 

He was a member of the French Trotskyist movement and worked as a teacher and journalist before entering politics.

 

Despite his age, the 75-year-old fiery orator is popular among young voters and could even reach a run-off against Marine Le Pen in next year’s presidential elections.

 

I began with that bit of World War II history to give a sense of what was lost to the arsonists in Limoges. France, this is your history, your heritage, your inheritance. The French Resistance represented the best of your country: a proud people not willing to accept someone else’s decision to surrender, and standing up for themselves when thugs came along and tried to take away their country. Where’s the French spirit of resistance now?

 

The duty of the government is to protect the rights and property of the citizens and to maintain public order. The French government is utterly failing at that.

 

I notice the folks who instinctively quote Martin Luther King Jr’s “a riot is the language of the unheard” in response to news coverage of riots never seemed to want to apply that statement to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville or Capitol Hill on January 6. The invocation of that quote is usually disingenuous. King’s point was not that rioting was legitimate; he was arguing that denouncing a riot and shrugging off the conditions that led to it is not the moral choice.

 

King, speaking at Grosse Pointe High School in Michigan, March 14, 1968:

 

I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct-action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

 

But it’s very hard to argue that the French government is blithely dismissing the education of young people, the alleged motivation for the protests-turned-riots.

 

Over the weekend, our Charlie Cooke observed, “close to 60 percent of the French economy is government spending.” (For the pedants, it was 57.2 percent of GDP in 2025.)

 

But let’s look more specifically at education spending:

 

The French Ministry of National Education uses a broader measure, known as domestic expenditure on education, which counts all the money that goes into education, whether from the state, local authorities, businesses or households. As well as teaching, it covers adult and continuing training and related costs such as school meals, boarding and transport.

 

By this measure, France spent 199.2 billion Euros ($223 billion) on education in 2025, equivalent to 6.7 percent of its GDP and 2.4 billion Euros more than in 2024, according to provisional ministry figures.

 

As a percentage of GDP, France’s education spending ranks ninth highest out of 29 European countries. That does not look like skimping on schoolkids. If you’re wondering about the spending per student, “In the 2024-2025 academic year, France had 12,579,500 learners enrolled across pre-primary, elementary, secondary, and apprenticeship tracks.” Total education spending of $223 billion divided by 12.5 million learners comes to $17,840 per student. That is slightly higher than $17,619 U.S. national average of public-school spending per student in 2024, the most recent year figures were available.

 

While particular schools in France may have problems, there is no compelling argument that France as a country has neglected the education of its students.