The savagery of the riots that have ravaged France’s major cities over the weekend of October 18-19 is such that the media are struggling to deny the obvious: a France drawing closer to the abyss with each passing day. And an LFI [La France Insoumise] that may well fall victim to its own strategy.

Sunday morning: general consternation in the face of disaster. For once, the whole little media world is more or less in agreement. Le Journal du dimanche runs the headline “Chaos.” But La Tribune dimanche, its rival little brother from the central bloc1, does the same, with… “Chaos.” More revealing still, on Le Monde‘s website, its live coverage of recent days is still presented under the banner of “Chaos.” As for Le Parisien, a traditionally timid daily, it is more explicit still, with this huge front-page headline: “Scenes of Insurrection.”

Has something unprecedented happened, then, this past weekend? Evidently, yes.

Emmanuel Macron, like a sub-prefect in the fields…2

Nearly a thousand members of the security forces injured, and even more shops ransacked and looted; the Tourist Office and the Hôtel de Ville of Limoges engulfed in flames. And that is not an exhaustive inventory. Meanwhile, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron are swaying along to Céline Dion at one of her final Paris concerts. Granted, they say it was the one not to miss; but for a President of the Republic, it is perhaps not the first place to be seen. All the more so since the next day he was flying off on a tour of the Persian Gulf. That left him just enough time to address the French people on the evening of Sunday 18 October, to survey the damage, declare that all this was intolerable, and say he would act with the utmost firmness. Certain “presstitute”3 colleagues, more or less leftist trash and surely ill-intentioned, claim this little speech was drafted with the help of artificial intelligence. That is surely a gross exaggeration, given that for spouting such platitudes a genuine idiot does the job perfectly well. Better still: in these times of budgetary famine, he comes even cheaper. In short, it’s not that this necessarily reeks of the end of a reign, but it looks damned like it.

Meanwhile, Laurent Nuñez, Minister of the Interior, tenders his resignation, which the Élysée immediately refuses. After all, why deprive oneself of the best? Here again, the press is unanimous. The Place Beauvau4 failed to gauge how large events would grow. Too many police where fewer were needed, and not enough where more would have been. Above all, the police were tired. Physically, certainly, but morally too. Especially when Emmanuel Macron reproaches them for their “lack of empathy” towards young protesters who are adult enough to throw Molotov cocktails at the police, but too young to sample the delights of penitentiary hospitality.

Left-wing papers that no longer know which foot to dance on…

Unsurprisingly, Libération and L’Humanité, pleading the lack of foresight shown by Laurent Nuñez’s services, single them out as the chief troublemakers. Here, their dialectical contortions are worth the detour. For L’Humanité, which leads with “The Social Explosion,” it would be indelicate to mention violence by housing-estate thugs and far-left activists; the paper once founded by Jean Jaurès confines itself to castigating an Emmanuel Macron who “is only reaping what he has sown,” which, in a sense, is not entirely false. One simply notes that the historic Communist daily has become a leftist rag. We had known it for a long time; now it is confirmed.

The case of Libération is more Jesuitical. Reality is not denied there, though it is deemed to warrant a few adjustments. To be sure, the paper does not skip over the racailles5 from the “quartiers,”6 but it means to decouple them from the political activists who emerged from Mélenchonism and its immediate surroundings. Bad luck: the paper publishes a photo of a branch of MAIF, the well-known insurance company. On its vandalized façade, the inevitable ACAB tags, as if the small-time dealers of the DZ Mafia7 knew what this Anglo-Saxon acronym meant. To blame all this violence on the children of immigration is a dangerous game. Moreover, a resident of the Canal Saint-Martin interviewed by our colleagues at Libé unwittingly reveals what he really thinks: “Of course it’s frightening. When we were young, if we wanted cash, we pushed our luck a bit: we went down into the street to sell drugs. Today these kids are obsessed with money. They don’t give a damn about anything anymore.” True enough, my good sir: the ultra-left really was better in the old days.

The trap of racialization…

It is just as true that the ultra-left was once a White affair, and that it was Whites, paradoxically, who theorized anti-White racism. A conceptual boomerang that now smacks them right in the teeth. One should never let children play with grown-ups’ things. For this witness cannot be unaware that his descendants also conceptualized the famous “convergence of struggles” between “conscientized” youth and its “racialized” counterpart, knowing that, with a few exceptions (Bally Bagayoko and Rokhaya Diallo had the good fortune to have their studies paid for by the colonial state), these two populations do not obey the same logics. A dialectical hiatus at least as tortuous as those LGBTQUI+ QWERTYUIOP activists head over heels in love with a Palestine where their life expectancy would not exceed two minutes flat.

Precarious intellectuals and rich kids from the posh districts want the end of capitalism (not a bad idea in itself), whereas the marginals of the housing projects, dealers in assorted wares — drugs, tracksuits or trainers — think only of money and see themselves as capitalist entrepreneurs, complete with bimbos and swimming pools, with Dubai as their ultimate Mecca.

So this is a “convergence of struggles” that does not necessarily bode well for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, especially when one knows that a far from negligible share of this France born of immigration aspires only to live in peace, just like any Français de souche,8 going so far as to vote 15% for the Rassemblement National. Proof of this: in Paris, many of the shops looted by these children of immigrants were run by other children of immigrants, as Pascal Praud noted on Europe 1, and the least one can say of him is that he is anything but a rabid immigrationist.

This France presented as “new”9 is thus more a racialist concept than plain reality. Worse, this insurrection, even if partly infiltrated by LFI, seems to have taken on proportions that could become uncontrollable, and may well do no favors to the president-for-life of La France Insoumise (LFI).10 His strategy of sound and fury has been designed to put him in a second round against Marine Le Pen. But he still has to reach that last step of the podium. In light of these events, it is not certain he is on course for it.

Originally published in Éléments on October 20th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor