The French Are on Their Own, and They Know It

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Last weekend’s horrifying riots — only the most violent expression of the unrest that has plagued France for over a month — seem to have chastened the country’s notoriously permissive political class.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron blamed the catastrophe that unfolded on October 17 and 18, in which 3,000 stores were looted and over a thousand police officers were wounded amid the arrest of 2,700 rioters, on “seditious” elements within the French “ultra-left.” He implemented localized curfews while the Interior Ministry promised 20 percent more police as well as a military presence on the ground across the country this weekend. Authorities promised to be “uncompromising” toward “all those who will commit atrocities,” but local French officials have not inspired confidence.

 

Despite a general ban on large gatherings in cities like Lyon, Nice, Le Havre, and Marseille, union organizations have been granted permits to hold marches — the same unions that have displayed a conspicuous toleration for the last month’s violence. A public furor forced the city of Marseille to reverse its decision to halt public transportation over the weekend, but its local business council advised shop owners to board up their stores. Many more store owners nationwide are preemptively shuttering their businesses. In Paris, marchers are restricted to certain highly policed routes. Nevertheless, the Louvre will remain closed, while other public events are shutting down early ahead of the expected chaos.

 

No one seems to believe French authorities can get their hands around the riotous elements in their midst. From the Pittsburgh Steelers, which canceled a weekend fan event in Paris, to the French right, which is planning counterprotests, everyone seems to anticipate more violence.

 

Forsaken by their nation’s public officials, the French are preparing to take their safety into their own hands.

 

“A lot of them are saying, ‘Yes, this time, they will fight back,’” said Times of London correspondent Adam Sage. “Will they in practice? I don’t know,” he continued. “When you’re faced with a horde of fifty rioters, looters, there’s probably not much you can do.”

 

Practical considerations do often militate against a one-man stand against a violent mob. Yet, in the days since last weekend’s rioting, a heroic archetype has emerged in France: the shopkeeper who resists.

 

Millions in France and worldwide celebrated the stubborn resolve demonstrated by the Nice-based gaming shop owner “Pierre,” who beat back the rioters sacking his shop and was, in turn, beaten himself. Euronews summarized the emerging personality cult around the defiant storekeeper:

 

Pierre has turned not just into a symbol of courage in France, but he has also become an icon for gamers. An image of him standing defiantly in the shop entrance next to a poster of Goku, a character from the Dragon Ball manga series, has quickly transformed him into a superhero around the world, with some branding him the “French Goku.”

 

‼️Goku existe y vive en Francia‼️
Todo mi apoyo a este héroe 💪#fotodelaño2026 pic.twitter.com/I5WrPTLd45

 

— KhaN ComicS (@IvaNxKhaN) October 18, 2026

 

“Pierre” is not alone. A variety of videos of “showing other heroic individuals taking matters into their own hands and facing off against rioters and looters” have since emerged. While the initial footage of the riots featured hapless French citizens pleading unsuccessfully with their attackers to spare themselves and their property, the newer fare finds the French people attacking their tormentors with blunt implements or pouring boiling water down on them from their besieged redoubts.

 

France’s political class remains besotted with the abstract idea of protest, and they all, irrespective of political affiliation, are inclined to respond to the “social crisis” represented by France’s insolvency with greater profligacy. Only in the aftermath of last weekend’s devastation have its officials mustered the resolve to defend France’s law-abiding citizens. But French authorities squandered public trust long ago.

 

The people anticipate anarchy. In an anarchic environment, we should expect some to revert to a Hobbesian state, lashing out with brutal force driven by an unrelenting instinct for self-preservation.

Macron’s ‘Turning Point’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, October 24, 2026

 

There was a series of shootings on Friday in Trappes, France. One person was murdered and five others injured, including a twelve-year-old girl, who was hit eight times and is in a serious but reportedly stable condition.

 

The French interior minister said the (sole) suspect, who has been caught, used what appeared to be “a military-grade weapon, or at least an automatic weapon, on five people in different locations.” He also said that there was “a rather strong indication” that the crime was terror-related.

 

Reuters:

 

Nicolas Dainville, the mayor of nearby La Verriere, said the suspect was “of a European type.” Rabeh [the mayor of Trappes] said two of the victims were of African ⁠and North ​African origin, respectively, and did not provide details about the ​backgrounds of the other victims.

 

President Macron has rightly condemned this horrific attack, but the way in which he did so was far from reassuring.

 

Reuters:

 

“What happened today is, I am telling you, a turning point, because it is the first ​time we have had a terrorist act that was planned to kill our compatriots, our ​children, based on the colour of their skin or their religion,” Macron told ⁠reporters.

 

The first time?

 

As was quickly pointed out on X and elsewhere: Not exactly.

 

To take a couple of examples from many: What about the two Islamist terrorists, who in 2016 attacked those attending a Mass in a Catholic church? They took a number of those attending prisoner and killed the officiating priest, Jacques Hamel, by slitting his throat. Father Hamel was 85.

 

The next day a Mass was held in Father Hamel’s memory at Notre-Dame. Macron was among those in attendance.

 

But he didn’t seem to remember Hamel when he spoke on Friday.

 

And what about the attack in 2012 by Mohammed Merah, an Islamist gunman, on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse?

 

He murdered four people, three of them under ten years old.

 

Merah was killed in the aftermath of the attack, but he has been in the news recently. A rap song referencing (and named after) him was recently released (it also namechecks Hitler and the only survivor of the group responsible for the 2015 Paris attacks). It has been chanted by high schoolers during at least one demonstration and was being played by another group of teenagers as they filmed themselves riding scooters and skateboards inside a church.

 

Given the controversy the song has stirred up and the fact that it and the incident in the church have triggered a legal response by the authorities, it might have been thought that Merah’s crimes would have been on Macron’s mind when he spoke. But it seems not.

 

Later on Friday, Macron, clearly responding to criticism of his earlier comments, tweeted out an additional response to the Trappes shooting.

 

He still referred to the shootings as a turning point:

 

We are confronted with an act of extreme gravity, and one that, by its proven racist nature, marks a turning point for our country.

 

But, among other points, added this:

 

I also want to recall an essential truth and avoid any controversy: in recent years, our country has experienced attacks that targeted Christians because they were Christians and Jews because they were Jews. None of these victims must be forgotten. No pain must be ranked above another. And I want nothing tonight to add to the grief of the families, to the sorrow of the country, or to the nation’s solemn reflection.

 

But if antisemitism is racism (it is, of course), there has been no “turning point,” but rather a descent further along a path toward a very dark place.

 

To reverse course is going to take more skill than Macron showed yesterday.

What the French Protests Can Teach Americans

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.

 

But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.

 

The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in—socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc.—the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.

 

The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits—i.e., took in less than it spent—for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15 percent of GDP. Today it’s at 116  percent. Government spending now makes up 57 percent of the GDP (compared with 23 percent of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” —including pensions and family benefits—as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.

 

Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone—France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well—the top 10 percent of French taxpayers provide 74 percent of the revenue. The top 1 percent provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.

 

I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14 percent of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4 percent of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.  

 

I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet, in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.

 

When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

 

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth—much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns., It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.

 

France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.

 

France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.

 

The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.

A New French Revolution

By John O’Sullivan

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

What is at present being enacted on our laptops, websites, and television screens is another French Revolution. It is possible — indeed, greatly to be desired — that this revolution will be contained, halted, and reversed, but that possibility seems remote at the moment. Rather, the contagion is spreading throughout France with minimal resistance from the authorities and currently leaping over borders to northern Italian cities and with almost identical slogans — Gaza! No longer an actual place but a Myth — that have little to do with either French or Italian life or serious politics.

 

This current Revolution also borrows from terrorism the doctrine of recognizing none of the usual distinctions between innocent and guilty, participant and bystander, soldier and civilian, foreign and domestic. Anyone who is not tearing down French institutions or is self-evidently prosperous or merely respectable is suspect and thus deserving of brutal punishment, not excluding rape. Such terrible confusions often happen in revolution as in war. But this Revolution has introduced some new and significant distinctions in its fragile and temporary blend of Islamo-Gauchisme — Muslim-owned stores are protected by some rioters and their advisors.

 

And because of technical advances in communications, almost every revolutionary moment — every building burnt, every bourgeois hauled from his car and stripped, every mob storming a police station, every fashion emporium or mom-and-pop shop looted — is being broadcast to the world. If or when the authorities seek to restore some semblance of order, their repression will be broadcast, too. But there will be this difference: Every revolutionary outrage will encourage the criminals and activists to greater efforts; every police overreaction will shame the authorities and be cited as an argument for “dialogue’’ and “restraint’’ by the one-eyed media.

 

There are no justifications for this upsurge of violent rebellion, of course — merely angry grievances by groups of discontented people, mainly young, many from immigrant backgrounds (even if born in France), all persuaded that they are either oppressed or uniquely sensitive to the plight of the oppressed, and protected by their ignorance and illiteracy from reality.

 

If there are no justifications, though, there are causes. Take, for instance, the original cause of their rebellion. Students stormed out of their schools complaining of poor conditions that required more expenditure. Doubtless there are some poor conditions. But why is that? Students and their communities could help to repair those conditions, but they think that is the job of the state. And it is. France spends massively on public schools as on everything else. Public spending amounts to 57 percent of the country’s GDP — among the highest rates in the European Union — but conditions are poor throughout the public sector as in all socialist societies which encourage demands but fail to reward responsibility. In schools and colleges, those low standards increasingly include the ideology that no one shall fail and all shall have prizes. The result is, as the distinguished philosopher Chantal Delsol writes in her commentary on the coming French presidential election: “Thus, in France today an immense group of illiterates is produced, wedded to screens, ignorant of spelling and deprived of a vocabulary.’’

 

They do not, however, emerge without opinions. Quite the contrary: They emerge from their socialist experience with an ultra-progressive ideology of extreme egalitarianism, anti-capitalism, and cultural hostility to France and its historical institutions and identity. That might almost be a blend of European socialism and American woke-ism and thus one step towards the internationalizing of the students’ ideology in a way that never happened (or happened much later) to the original Sixty-Eighters who failed to topple de Gaulle. On graduation, they then gravitate to the parties of the Far Left, notably La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon, as activists and in due course as its leaders. Not surprisingly, it was this group that immediately joined the students and helped to broaden their cause into a wider rebellion with larger aims, a more organized base of support, and a more dangerous ideology.

 

Because Melenchon’s party has long embraced France’s Islamists as a key faction in the “New France’’ coalition he believes to be a potential electoral majority next time, that brought a much more significant ally into the Revolution. Mass immigration by Third World migrants has imported into France new ethnic and religious communities whose cultural loyalties clash with national traditions and undermine the sense of national community that makes democracy possible. Without that, as Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, all politics becomes about race and religion. Whether he realizes it or not — and he must because it seems to be his actual strategy — Melenchon has now tapped into what is now a global leftist ideology that is less a rival than a synthesis of all other leftist causes. As the Hudson Institute scholar Zineb Riboua pointed out on X:

 

The contemporary Left is being absorbed by a new wave of Third-Worldism that treats anti-Israel politics as the core axis of moral meaning. Gaza has become the central symbol because it fuses every theme the activist Left needs: victimhood, colonial injustice, racial hierarchy, and global resistance. This is why figures like Greta Thunberg shifted from climate justice to Gaza without hesitation. Climate politics offered urgency but not a revolutionary antagonist. Gaza provides both.

 

The result is a Revolution which, in addition to its other roots in French society, has the support of a major political party, a global ideology that resonates worldwide, a much more divided society than de Gaulle faced in 1968 when its divisions were rooted in class rather than race or religion, and finally, numerous unsolved economic crises. To put it simply, the French state is running out of money. Its debts amount to more than 120 percent of annual GDP; it is paying higher rates of interest on that debt than is Italy; and its working citizens are already highly taxed. France can’t buy itself out of these problems. And the country is a long way from thinking itself out of them.

 

The parties of the right in France and other European countries cannot escape responsibility for these problems. When they were in office, they pursued many of the same policies, and in opposition they failed to oppose or even analyze them vigorously. When “populist’’ conservatives arose to champion their old causes, they joined with the left in grand coalitions to keep them out of power all costs. What will they do now to confront this growing disorder which has the potential to overthrow democracy and even to evolve into civil war? That’s an urgent question an election is due early next year and until then one of the main threats to the French Republic is the weak political leadership of President Macron. To quote an editorial in Le Figaro:

 

If the far left, criminals, and looters can turn France completely upside down within a few hours, it is above all because a self-intoxicated technocratic monarchy has systematically leveled all the moral, security-related, cultural, and economic safeguards that hold a society together.  Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s useful idiots do not just wear the kufiya, but also the necktie.

 

Thus conservatives in other French parties should be prepared to work both with the president in dealing with the immediate crisis, and with Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblemant National in shaping solutions to the deeper crises of France and its great but wounded civilization. For the moment, what France needs is the restoration of order by civilized methods that will probably have to include calling in the army. Allowing the barbarism in the streets to spread would mean more and worse.

The Anti-French Revolt in France

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

‘All my life,” Charles de Gaulle famously said, “I have had a certain idea of France.”

 

This, though, was presumably not what he had in mind. France has been wracked by riots targeting public buildings and symbols of the nation, as well as ordinary commercial concerns.

 

Of course, France has a long tradition of unrest on the streets. If someone isn’t setting a car alight somewhere in the country in protest, you almost wonder what’s gone wrong. In 1968, President de Gaulle himself briefly fled Paris for fear that student protesters were going to topple the government, before finding his nerve.

 

So, it’s not unusual that things are getting wrecked and burned, but the disorder is portentous all the same. It started as demonstrations against underfunded schools and has morphed into a red-green campaign of mayhem ranging much more widely.

 

Palestinian flags and the slogan “Free Palestine” are ubiquitous. It’s not clear what either of these things should have to do with burning down the elegant, 19th-century town hall building in Limoges or looting a Louis Vuitton store. But the Palestinian banner has become the equivalent of the North Vietnamese flag in the 1970s — a symbol of resistance to the West, and in this case, fierce opposition to Zionism and so-called settler-colonialism.

 

The flag also speaks to the immigrant component of the riots. France has done a poor job of assimilating immigrants and their children, a large portion of whom are Muslims from North Africa, thanks to France’s colonial history and, in particular, its incorporation of Algeria into France for a period of time (an insanely unrealistic project).

 

The problems that France has been creating for itself were foreseeable, and indeed foreseen. As long ago as March 1959, de Gaulle is reported to have warned, “The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty?”

 

One way to look at these riots is as Frantz Fanon’s revenge. What the great mid-20th-century theorist of anti-colonial resistance called “the wretched of the earth” are living in the downtrodden suburbs of Paris and, in effect, seeking to colonize the colonizers.

 

Make no mistake, though — white radicals, too, have taken a large hand in the disorder. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of an ascendant left-wing party, has participated in the protests and condemned police for their supposedly brutish tactics. He celebrates the “creolization” of France and views immigrants and their children as part of a potential “bloc de rupture” that can revolutionize French politics and shift it radically to the left.

 

What’s ultimately in play is French identity. The country has traditionally had a universalizing mission (whether advancing Christianity or evangelizing for Enlightenment values, depending on the regime) joined to a deep pride in the French nation. The rioters, who are illiberal and unpatriotic, aren’t much interested in either. Mélenchon has said that French identity cannot be a “tradition” but is a “creation in permanent evolution” — and here, as has often happened in France’s history, it is evolving on the streets.

 

The unrest also serves as a warning that, should the French public reject this left-wing vision and turn to the outré nationalist Marine Le Pen in next year’s election, the country will be made ungovernable. With the disorder spreading elsewhere, other Western European countries will also have to take note.

 

A key element of de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” was its inherent greatness. His beloved France, though, is already a second-rank power. Its debt-to-GDP ratio is 120 percent of GDP, while much of the public apparently believes it is living under intolerable austerity and that there is no political will to pull back on spending. An overmatched President Emmanuel Macron, presiding over a restive country, represents an exhausted center that has done much to bring the nation to this point.

 

Whatever France’s immediate future, greatness is not going to be part of the picture.

Eurozone Crisis 2.0?

By John Gustavsson

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Although the unrest in France is unlikely to grow into another French Revolution, it could in retrospect prove to be a pivotal moment in triggering the next eurozone debt crisis. French bond yields have risen sharply in the middle of a global bond selloff, and the difference between French and German yields are now greater than at any point since the early 2010s. Other eurozone countries, largely untouched by the crisis 15 years ago, are now also in the danger zone. One thing is clear: Another eurozone debt crisis would not look like the first one.

 

The eurozone crisis of the early 2010s followed the global financial crisis of 2008. The trigger varied by country: Ireland and Spain saw collapsing housing and credit bubbles, while long-standing fiscal problems and fudged numbers resurfaced in Greece. During the boom years, the common currency delivered an artificially strong euro and unusually cheap borrowing to countries that had previously faced higher interest rates and frequent devaluations of their pre-euro national currencies. When the crisis hit, these now over-indebted countries were unable to set their own interest rates and depreciate their currencies, as they no longer had their own currencies. Rising sovereign yields threatened bank balance sheets (many of which held large amounts of domestic government debt), prompting bank bailouts that further increased public debt and deepened the spiral. Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and especially Greece lost normal market access.

 

Facing the risk of contagion that could destroy the currency altogether, the European Commission, reinforced by market interventions by the European Central Bank, orchestrated a series of bailouts funded by the vehicles underwritten by eurozone members and the International Monetary Fund. The eurozone was saved, but underneath the surface, structural problems remained.

 

Though countries such as Ireland staged a strong recovery, in much of continental Europe, growth remained sluggish and deficits remained stubbornly high. The EU’s rule against deficits above 3 percent of GDP continue to be ignored, with France’s deficit running over 5 percent for the past three years. Neighboring Belgium is doing about as poorly, with Italy only slightly better. Less indebted but still vulnerable countries include the likes of Finland and Slovakia. History suggests that investors, if forced to reevaluate one formerly safe haven (e.g., France), will soon take a much closer look at others.

 

Some American observers have noted that French debt-to-GDP and French ten-year yields are still below American levels. This, however, is cold comfort: America can sustain a higher level of government debt on account of the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. Also, and while this is far from a get-out-of-jail-free card, technically, the United States cannot be forced to default, since its debt is issued in a currency that it prints. This is not true for France, or any of the other countries that use the euro.

 

A debt crisis is not by any means a sure thing. What is sure, however, is that such a crisis, were it to happen, would look very different than the one during the early 2010s.

 

To begin with, a debt crisis would realistically require Thatcherite welfare and tax reforms. Whereas the first eurozone crisis was first and foremost a financial crisis caused by an unsustainable surge in cheap credit overheating peripheral eurozone economies, a new crisis would be a truly economic crisis caused by a decade or more of accumulating structural issues: a loss of competitiveness causing a long slog with little economic growth resulting in little growth in tax revenues, combined with an aging population and an underemployed migrant population. The recent French riots, though not explicitly in response to cuts, have reminded French — and European — politicians of just how dangerous public anger can be, especially coming from the aforementioned immigrant population. France has only implemented modest tightening, and there has already been serious trouble. No doubt this will make many policymakers hesitate to support broader reforms.

 

The upcoming French presidential election in April next year does not make it easier. The two candidates most likely to make it into the run-off are Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the far left LFI, and the populist right National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. The former has indicated he would partially default on France’s debt, even openly mocking the idea of “reassuring the markets.” Of the two, Le Pen would be the better alternative, but even she has so far resisted calls to raise the retirement age, even suggesting she may lower it back from 64 to 62, or even down to 60 for certain groups. She does promise other spending cuts, but these may not be enough — even if she’s able to pass them at all.

 

Second, this crisis would be different because France, in particular, may just be too big to fail. In the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, several measures were implemented to prevent a repeat: The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is supposed to provide funds for countries in financial turmoil but does not have anywhere close to unlimited resources, and conditions would be attached. Outright Monetary Transactions — the purchase on the secondary market by the ECB of the short-term bonds of a country in trouble — is another backstop, but again this is supposed to have fiscal conditions attached to it. Aiding a country flagrantly violating EU deficit rules would make a mockery of those rules and would encourage others to ignore them, setting the stage for future crises.

 

An important distinction between the 2010s crisis and what might be coming is that the Greeks and Irish were genuinely concerned that, if they did not yield to the EU’s harsh demands for austerity, they might be kicked out of the club. The French, on the other hand, know that the club does not exist without them in it. Does that mean that France will get off scot-free? Not so fast.

 

Nobody in Germany requested an encore. During the last crisis, the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) — then known as a “professor’s party” with a strong, classically liberal strain — was formed to oppose the bailout of Greece and other troubled member states, arguing that Germany should cut its losses and let them fail. The AfD remains a broadly euroskeptic party, and if another debt crisis occurred, and Germany once again agreed to bail out other members of the eurozone, it just might strike a definitive deathblow to the country’s political mainstream — and even more so if a hypothetical French, Belgian, or Italian bailout didn’t come with the tough conditions imposed on Ireland and Greece last time around. These countries were effectively placed under administration, with years of national budgets having to be approved by an unelected troika of the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF. France is not a country that likes being pushed around (and it’s not too keen on living within its means, either, having run a budget deficit every year since 1974). French voters might very well prefer default to subjecting themselves to troika rule.

 

The ECB, having assured investors that the eurozone crisis was a one-time thing, would find its credibility seriously questioned. It could drastically lower interest rates to try to ease the burden on France and other troubled nations, but as always this would come with the risk of higher inflation. With inflation already on a steady upward trend since this summer, and with several countries more worried about inflation than deficits, this balancing act will only get harder.

 

Making matters worse politically is the fact that the European Union has explicitly endorsed deficit spending for the purpose of rearmament. During the first half of the 2010s, military spending was on the chopping block as European policymakers looked for easy cuts to balance budgets. For geopolitical reasons, that won’t be an option if another debt crisis kicks off, but convincing voters to accept continued rearmament while slashing social welfare will still be a hard sell.

 

Brussels has also encouraged heavy government spending on decarbonization. Without expensive subsidies, tax credits, and government investment into green sectors, the EU’s already unrealistic climate goals would be completely out of reach. Unfortunately, the sunk cost is too great: Too many industries and too many jobs have been lost, and too much political capital invested in the transition, for Brussels to turn around and say, “Forget net zero, save your economies.” After all, a debt crisis is nothing compared with an uninhabitable planet — which is what Brussels has told Europeans is at stake if they don’t go green.

 

In 2012 the message from Brussels was a simple “Don’t spend beyond your means,” something voters, however much they hated austerity, fundamentally agreed with. This time, the message would be far more muddled: “Deficit spending is bad, except for in these areas which we in Brussels deem worthy.”

 

On top of this, the EU is planning to raise membership fees. While the hike, if passed, is not going to be anywhere close to a main deficit driver, it will present an easy political target (“Why is the EU getting more, while our retirees and unemployed receive less?”), further hurting the EU’s credibility with ordinary Europeans.

 

How it ends is hard to predict. Wealth taxes, which most of Europe already abolished for good reason, would almost certainly stage a comeback as left-wing populism surged. Eurobonds — joint bonds issued by the eurozone — were first discussed during the first eurozone crisis. The proposal was revived during the Covid-19 pandemic, and such bonds would certainly be hotly debated once again.

 

Supporters of EU centralization will argue that the problem is the EU’s lack of authority to directly intervene in the day-to-day fiscal affairs of its member states, that if Brussels had the power to force countries to raise taxes or reduce spending, national budgets could be balanced. Euroskeptics will, in turn, point to the growth-hampering bureaucracy imposed by the union to make the case that Brussels already has its fingers in too many pies. The skeptics are right, but “less EU” is only part of the Thatcherite package that Europe will need to get out of its low-growth, high-debt slog.

 

A debt crisis is not inevitable. Though bond yields have risen, no eurozone country has lost market access. If the next French president, likely Marine Le Pen, were to rise to the challenge of taking on France’s entrenched interests and win, this may even provide political cover and embolden other European leaders to follow suit. Otherwise, markets will eventually, like in the 2010s, force Europe to do what its leaders will not. To quote the words of the economist Herb Stein, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

The French Left Unleashes Revolution Politics

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Yes, readers, as terrible as things look in America right now, there’s always our ever-more-deeply doomed European counterparts to gaze upon, in abject horror, pity, and smugness. (I’ve stopped writing about the U.K. altogether these days because it feels like abusing a quadriplegic.) On October 2, I noted in these pages that France was burning, amid student rioting.

 

I know, I know . . . <yawn> . . . what else is new? French students have been tearing apart their country since Philip II Augustus made the mistake of recognizing the University of Paris in 1200, and an entire generation of Americans was raised not only on “Street Fighting Man,” but the deeply internalized impression that — unlike other, more serious countries — your average Frenchman will not fight in a war of self-defense but will riot when their croissants are insufficiently buttery.

 

But nearly three weeks later, France is still burning. In fact, the “student” rioting is growing ever more fierce and disruptive, as rioters are beginning to turn their attentions away from schools and toward the nation’s civic monuments, historical buildings, and luxury stores. In Paris, barricades were erected in the Place de la République as Palestinian flags flew, storefronts were looted, and monuments vandalized. (Why, it almost felt like a slice of life from Chicago, ca. May 2020.) In Limoges, the historic and beautiful town hall was burned to the ground. The Louvre, France’s national heritage as contained in one museum, is currently closed for the foreseeable future due to the “student social movement.” (The Louvre, in its classically understated French way, apologized to the world’s tourists “for the inconvenience.”)

 

It is a national disgrace, and nobody is quite sure when or how it will end. France typically experiences student unrest before the start of the school year, but this is qualitatively different in its extent, duration, and escalatory nature. And there is reason to believe that, even while its initial origins may not have been explicitly political, the chaos is now being directed to partisan ends.

 

Behind all of this stands the figure of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, far-left-wing socialist and leader of the political party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed,” LFI for short). Mélenchon has twice run as a candidate for France’s presidency and will be on the ballot again in 2027. He and his party are actively encouraging the rioting, and they will tell you why, too.

 

Mélenchon’s political vision is explicitly built on the “creolisation” of “nouvelle France” (his words). Since your average Frenchman, as liberal as he is, will never be as left-wing as a postmodern socialist, Mélenchon actively pushes for the empowerment (and increase) of third-world migrants, through whom he believes his communist beliefs will finally be brought to power: the triumph of the vanguard of the proletariat, riding the Islamic demographic wave. (This dynamic is often referred to as the “red-green alliance.”)

 

Mélenchon and the LFI have been devoting their support and organizing behind the student rioting as they seek to consolidate their position as the only plausible “leftist” candidate in next year’s presidential race against right-wing bogeywoman Marine Le Pen. For those who suggest that this is sheer electoral folly and that Le Pen will steamroll the candidate of left-wing revolution, Mélenchon knows this too. These events are in fact intended as a warning: The rioting you are seeing now — driven in large part by the disaffected children of North African immigrants — is but a preview of what to expect next year should the nativist Le Pen win the election. Une France ungouvernable.

 

Which is what Mélenchon wants. The term “revolutionary” sounds strange in any post-1776 American context. But to Europeans, it’s merely another flavor of public politics. To put it in terms that extremely online Americans might understand, Mélenchon is an “accelerationist.” He has been constantly clear that his goal is revolution: He cannot win at the ballot box, so his hope is that once he loses to Le Pen, the mass civil unrest will topple France’s Fifth Republic altogether, clearing the way for a militantly socialist Sixth Republic — presumably led by people like him.

 

The stakes for France right now are far higher than many realize.

 

Trump Cancels Hegseth’s Public Execution

 

A brief note on a much-needed reprieve from barbarism: After first announcing that he supported Pete Hegseth’s impossibly soft-brained idea to publicly stream the execution via firing squad of Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan, Donald Trump has reversed course and announced that the U.S. military will not, in fact, be getting into the business of making government-branded snuff films. Thankfully, sanity has prevailed.

 

If nothing else, it is proof that Trump can be talked out of a bad decision — so long as it is not his own. But that leaves us with a question about the man whose enthusiastic idea it was to execute a jihadist on the internet: What is Pete Hegseth’s major malfunction? I can understand the need to purge the military of politically correct nonsense; absolutely nobody was demanding the perversion of military law, honor, and tradition.

 

Nobody except, perhaps, Pete Hegseth. My guess is that this was about his panicked need to appeal to Trump with a splashy “tough guy” headline. Hegseth, currently the only truly fireable face in a war of choice quickly depleting the Trump administration’s political capital and international credibility, is sitting in the hottest of seats. Ol’ Pistol Pete knows very little about defense policy but an awful lot about what the president likes to see on Fox News: His (admittedly innovatory) idea was to get attention by shooting a condemned, blindfolded terrorist in a wheelchair as he unrepentantly screamed “Allahu Akbar!,” which tells you something about how the brain trust surrounding Trump tends to think.

 

Sure, it may have been a grotesque betrayal of the American spirit and the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as a devastating self-inflicted setback for U.S. foreign policy had it come to pass, but no harm, no foul! That all comes out in the wash, I suppose. And besides, something has to distract voters from the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Trashiness, Depressingly, Doesn’t Even Stand Out

 

Did you know that Kimberly Guilfoyle was once an ambassador to Greece? I myself must have missed it amid the oncoming rush of appointments like “Matt Gaetz as attorney general” and “Pete Hegseth as secretary of thumos” in December 2024. But the Wall Street Journal did not, and credit to them for reporting so doggedly on Guilfoyle’s blatant corruption that she finally resigned — only when publicly asked to do so, mind you.

 

I’ve already written my share about gold-digging trash over the past few years at National Review, so I have nothing new to offer about this particular human grease fire, at least not here (and not on the record). But on a human level, I can certainly understand that Guilfoyle must be feeling unfairly smothered by the Trump family, and not even for the first time: Why should her ingrate ex-fiancé Don Jr. get his destination wedding (to a different bride) bought and paid for by the Russians, while our hardscrabble queen had to work the streets (and, apparently, sheets) to maintain her standard of living, desperately cadging her position to pay her American Express bills, begging on her knees for bribes from Greek businessmen and low-rent Balkan Slavs alike?

 

And how dare these administration hypocrites presume to hold it against her? Guilfoyle was only doing the same thing that 85 percent of the people within Trump’s immediate orbit (most especially his family members and in-laws) have been doing gleefully since before he returned to office, only more openly: capitalizing on their proximity to power to gorge themselves with private (and hopefully generational) financial gain. If the men at the top are already cutting side deals for personal profit, where’s her slice of the pie? Why is she being tossed under the bus? Is it just because Trump needs to take the heat off his decision to switch sides in the Russo-Ukrainian war for a cheap bribe? Yes, indeed — that really is just about the long and short of it. Guilfoyle was an obvious and easily jettisoned liability, cut loose at a time when Trump needed to toss some ballast into the ocean.

 

I really only have one observation to make about Kimberly Guilfoyle, in her well-earned disgrace: Long before she was Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, and before she was a cable news mainstay on Fox News, she was half of the most prestigious Democratic power couple in California: From 2001 to 2006, she was Mrs. Gavin Newsom. What does that say about Gavin Newsom’s judgment? More to the point, and given what she must know about those years, what does that say about Gavin Newsom’s future liabilities?

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.

The Pogrom Inside the Riots

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

They called them disaffected students — mere schoolchildren who wanted nothing more than livable conditions in their schools. It was a refrain that wore thinner as the weeks of violence in France persisted, as those so-called “students” festooned themselves with revolutionary accouterments and tore at the fabric of French society.

 

All the while, the French political class internalized a critique of themselves that the rioters were not making. What is wrong with us, they seemed to ask, that these young people would take a hatchet to their own heritage? Are the efforts by French police to subdue the violence only inspiring more of it? Are they really just angry over fuel prices?

 

The scale of the rioting this weekend seems to have disabused some in France of their affection for political street violence as a formative youthful experience. Police made thousands of arrests as over half a million people took to French streets across the country over the weekend. Almost 1,000 police were reportedly injured in the violence, the evidence of which is sobering.

 

French streets are littered with broken glass and debris in what were once posh shopping districts. The ancient spires that graced France’s  charming provincial skylines collapsed in on themselves as they burned. The rioters attacked tourism offices, city halls, and statues that embody the French Republic. Shopkeepers were assaulted by balaclava- and keffiyeh-clad assailants. Some pleaded tearfully with their tormentors, lecturing them on how their actions betray the “cause,” only to be pushed to the side so they might watch the destruction of their life’s work.

 

Perhaps the rioters understand their “cause” perfectly well.

 

The devastation was so widespread, the suffering so acute, that French authorities have shed some of their conspicuous tolerance for the weeks-long campaign of violence. Their reluctance to blur the distinctions between peaceful protesters and violent looters persists, but those with whom New York Times reporters spoke now note the degree to which the violent hordes take refuge within and lash out from those supposedly peaceful swarms.

 

Deservedly so. Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated a civilizational cancer.

 

“They came prepared,” said the French journalist Paul Amar. “They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners.” His account has circulated widely, though it has not yet been independently confirmed. Yet Amar’s sense of things aligns with the conclusions that other observers drew.

 

The rioters ransacked a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents. “It can’t be a coincidence that they chose to target a Jewish place of worship,” said one of its congregants. “They must have thought that since they are Jewish, there must be money there.” Likewise, Jewish shops in places like Paris and Marseille were pillaged.

 

Who could have seen it coming? Anyone who was paying attention to the rioters’ actions. They burned down their schools while insisting that all they sought were better ones. They scrawled “Al Aqsa Flood” and “Free Palestine” on building facades and monuments. They attacked civilians, police officers, and firefighters. Their vanguards dragged Palestinian, Algerian, and Soviet flags with them to the front lines of their fight with police. “Kill that b****!” they screamed, “By Allah kill her!” as they descended on their victims.

 

These are only the most violent expressions of a familiar sort of  vicious radicalism that those who understand its contours have warned was back in vogue. An outbreak of anti-Jewish violence across Europe in the years since the October 7 massacre has been particularly acute in France and Belgium. There, the visibly Jewish are stabbed and assaulted. Those with funny-sounding Jewish names are mocked by figures as prominent as far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The French Jews who weren’t ordered by authorities to remove the mezuzahs from their doors have done so as a prophylactic.

 

France’s Jews have gotten the message. The emigration of French Jews to Israel declined over the last decade, but it is now on the rise again. “It peaked at around 8,000 between 2012 and 2015, fell to about 1,000 in 2023, climbed back above 2,000 in 2024 and reached 3,500 in 2025,” Le Diplomate reported. “The Jewish Agency expects some 4,000 departures in 2026.”

 

“The desecration of the synagogue in Paris is a clear warning sign: What begins against Jews never stops there,” said the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Sacha Roytman. Today, the political class in France is awakening — albeit lazily and in protest — to the horrors that have metastasized on their watch. In a televised address to the French people, French President Emmanuel Macron couldn’t help but fawn over the noble protester and his abstracted “anguish and concern.” And yet, that rhetorical genuflection was hard to hear over Macron’s threat to suspend some civil liberties if the rioting continues.

 

Yet, if France’s politicians are finally getting the message, America’s aren’t.

 

“From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in,” California Representative Ro Khanna wrote Sunday. “In America, let us listen to our young. We need an economic and political transformation.”

 

The “transformation” that the Black Bloc agitators on France’s streets are attempting to engineer could not be more obvious or less desirable.

 

This summer, the Brussels-based rabbi Menachem Margolin warned Americans that what had already come to Europe was slouching toward America. “In Europe, antisemitism did not come back wearing a swastika,” he wrote. “It came back wrapped in slogans. It marched under the banner of justice. It called itself activism, and it dared anyone to object.”

 

In America, too, Jews are attacked in the streets. Their synagogues are the site of menacing and sometimes violent protests. They are excluded from civic events because of their suspected loyalty. They disguise their identities on America’s college campuses. Together, they spend north of $1 billion per year on their own security.

 

All this happened while America slept. We should not have to endure the French experience before we wake up to the West’s peril.

 

Seeing what has become of Europe, “knowing the guards, the fortress synagogues, the families who have already packed and gone,” Margolin asked Americans, “how could you possibly choose to let it happen” to you?

 

“Choose” is the right word. Europe chose to import and cater to the violent paranoia that has for so long typified the tribal dynamics in the Middle East. America can make a different choice. Indeed, it must.