For 33 days, the world has been riveted by the riots convulsing the streets of France. The protests, which began with students demanding better conditions in French schools, swiftly metastasized into something else. Protestors draped a Palestinian flag over the Joan of Arc statue in Toulouse. At least 3,000 shops have been vandalized, burned, or looted; over 1,000 police officers injured; the Limoges City Hall, built in 1883, survived two world wars but burned to the ground on October 17.
There have been over 2,400 arrests since the “protest movement” began, and scenes of violent clashes between rioters and police have filled social media feeds. Targeted curfews implemented on October 20 have brought a lull to the violence, but the phrase “civil war” has been invoked not just by conservative commentators such as Rod Dreher, but by the protestors themselves. On October 18, the Guardian ran a photo of a burning car next to graffiti reading: “Introduction to civil war.”
There is disagreement on what this all means. Mary Harrington insisted in Unherd that “France has not Fallen,” and compared the upheaval to the similarly violent George Floyd riots in America. Many pointed out that street-level violence is a longstanding French tradition (although, to be fair, so is bloody revolution). Vice President JD Vance echoed the most popular right-wing take, noting: “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
All of that is true, as far as it goes. But I think that what makes the French street scenes lighting up our smartphones so unsettling is that they reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization really is. It’s cliché to observe this, but that’s because it’s true. This may not be France’s tipping point, but it is a glimpse of what a tipping point will look like: law and order breaking down; police struggling to control mobs; business owners watching their shops burn and their possessions carried off by masked men; historic landmarks in flames.
Despite the voices assuring us that this, too, will pass, and that this surge of collective anger will be quelled just as previous ones have, we watch the chaos and a small voice in the back of our minds asks: “Is this it?” Nobody quite knows what “it” is, but we are all half expecting it, whatever it is.
As one of GK Chesterton’s characters once put it to a confident European: “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”
The shouting mobs in Paris this month remind me of another mob that assembled in front of the Eiffel Tower two years ago. On March 4, 2024, hundreds gathered in front of the iconic edifice as legislators voted to enshrine feticide into the French constitution in a historic joint session at the Palace of Versailles. Out of 925 legislators, 780 supported it – including Marine Le Pen, the right-wing leader of National Rally. The Paris crowd exploded in celebration, howling and waving flags and setting off smoke bombs. It was a triumphant revolution against the vulnerable voiceless.
The Eiffel Tower was lit up with flashing lights; several phrases were emblazoned on the tower: “Legal abortion” and “My Body My Choice.” As France faces a demographic implosion and President Emmanuel Macron openly discusses the national perils of anti-natalism, the country amended its constitution for the first time since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 – to make the “right” to kill pre-born children in the womb sacrosanct.
There is not much difference between the mobs of 2024 and 2026. The noiseless, sterile violence celebrated two years ago was the child sacrifice of the new suicidal state sacrament. The loud, smashing violence of the past month is what happens when your civilization begins to fray at the edges and the center cannot hold because you have been worshipping a hungry false god that both demands blood and returns it. I’ve written this before, because I believe it with all my heart: In the long term, you cannot have war in the womb and peace on the streets.
As Arnold Toynbee observed: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” But when a civilization endorses the murder of children, it is the first step toward suicide.
