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Chaos on the streets of French cities has brought back the seductive notion that violence can set you free. It is a myth—and a recipe for civil war, writes Bernard-Henri Lévy. Amid the uproar of the citizen demonstrations of recent weeks in France, and under the influence of leading figures in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s extreme-left party, France Unbowed (La France Insoumise), one theme is making a powerful comeback: the idea of an invisible, insidious, systemic violence supposedly exercised in democratic societies, which it is legitimate to oppose with the visible, direct, frank violence of the riot. I know this idea well. It was Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept when, in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth by the anticolonialist ideologue Frantz Fanon, Sartre presented the murder of the colonizer as the response to the oppression of the colonial system. It was the idea of the writer Jean Genet in a famous article, “Violence and Brutality,” published in Le Monde in 1977, in which he presented the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany as a necessity dictated by the anti-imperialist struggle. And it was already the idea of Georges Sorel who, at the very beginning of the 20th century in his Reflections on Violence, opposed the force of the “bourgeois state” with a “proletarian violence” endowed with supposedly regenerative virtues. I thought this idea had been discredited by the post-May 1968 intellectual movement, the critique of totalitarianism by the New Philosophers movement which I led, and the reckoning with the fascist, Nazi, and communist catastrophes. But apparently not. And so, we must start all over again. The first thing wrong with this notion of “counterviolence” is that it never strikes at the heart of the hated regime, but instead at the most exposed and most vulnerable people. The police officer who earns 2,000 euros a month, works night shifts, and protects, at the risk of his life, property, people, and the right to demonstrate. The shopkeeper who earns his gross profit on Saturdays and whose ransacked store was his only capital. The owner of the burned-out car who already struggled to afford a tank of gas and who must now find the money to replace the vehicle or face the obstacle course of dealing with insurance companies. The riot claims to strike at “the system,” but it falls upon women and men who are neither its masters nor its beneficiaries, but its humblest subjects. It claims to avenge the humiliated, but it adds to their humiliation fear, ruin, and the feeling of having been abandoned.

French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to prevent more rioting and looting by maintaining a heightened security presence and tasking his government to respond to some of the protesters’ demands.

France avoided a repeat of the violence that stunned the country on Oct. 17, but isn’t any closer to resolving underlying anger that’s fueled mass protests in France and shows few signs of abating. Bloomberg's Ben Sills has the details. (Source: Bloomberg)

Protesters waving Palestinian flags stormed the Colosseum in Rome, demonstrators looted shops in Barcelona and masked rioters hurled rocks, bottles and fireworks at police in Paris as another weekend of unrest unfolded across Europe.

‘No to lies of the state’

Thousands of police officers in riot gear descended on Paris Saturday to monitor France’s only sanctioned protest. The officers — wearing helmets and carrying shields — uniformly walked through the city as protesters shouted obscenities at them.

Riot police clashed with protesters in Paris on Saturday after a march over living costs drew around 110,000 people, according to France’s Interior Ministry. Footage captured demonstrators hurling projectiles, people being dragged away and storefronts being smashed as unrest spread to Marseille and Lyon.

Police in France arrested 1,314 rioters Saturday as violent street clashes continue to consume the country, the interior ministry said, adding 53 officers were hurt in clashes. The post France: 1,300+ Rioters Arrested, 53 Police Officers Injured in Continued Unrest appeared first on Breitbart .

While the police kept a lid on vandalism, the huge number of protesters, and France’s fraught politics, suggest unrest could grow.

Two kinds of people are rioting these days in the City of Light — Parisians and parasites. The Parisians are high school kids frustrated that there’s no money in the budget to upgrade their crumbling schools. The parasites are a toxic mix of leftists, Palestinian sympathizers, and so-called anti-fascists attaching themselves to the legitimate protesters […]

France avoided a repeat of large-scale violence and looting that marred nationwide protests a week ago, suggesting the government’s decision to boost police numbers and contain marches paid off.

NFL players and their wives and girlfriends took in the sights of Paris even as looming protests threatened to tear the city of lights apart.

After largely peaceful marches on Saturday, clashes broke out in the evening. But a large-scale police presence, 1,000 arrests and the rerouting of protest routes kept a lid on wholesale vandalism.

France's Interior Ministry said 410,000 people took part in protests nationwide, though unions said the true figure was twice as high.

Tourists were turned away from the Louvre as heightened security measures, nationwide demonstrations and fears of further unrest disrupted travel and major cultural attractions across Paris.

A new round of protests is set to hit France Saturday, raising fears of a repeat of last weekend’s riots.

French unrest pushed bond yields to a 24-year high as investors weigh budget, growth and sectors risks ahead of more protests.

France announced it will deploy 70,000 police officers on Saturday to combat rioting after last weekend's protests turned violent.

After arriving as an emigrant from Africa, I worked so hard to build a business. After it was attacked last weekend, a revolutionary young woman told me on live television that it didn’t matter, writes Jhemima Sheilha. How could anyone defend last weekend’s violent protests in France? In Paris alone, about 450 businesses were damaged, and about half of those were looted, according to authorities. Shopkeepers saw their livelihoods destroyed, their employees attacked, and their faith in the French Republic deeply shaken. But defending the rioters was exactly what influencer and college student Lola-Fleur Whittaker did on Monday night during a French television program called “La Grande Confrontation.” “Vos boutiques, c’est bien mignon,” she said mockingly, which translates to “Your shops, so sweet.” That was too much for Jhemima Sheilha, who was also on the program, to bear in silence. “It’s my life, Lola,” said Sheilha, whose new shop near Place de la République, Caffé Urban Bakery, was smashed with sledgehammers and ransacked. “What justifies terrorizing people’s lives?” Whittaker rolled her eyes. We asked Sheilha, 36, to describe what happened at the bakery she and her husband spent five years toiling to open, how she confronted the looters who took everything, and why she believes her business is now at risk of crumbling, along with France itself. —The Editors When I arrived in France in August 1999, I did not know my father. I had been raised by my uncle and my aunt after the death of my mother, Henriette, an activist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who campaigned against the country’s former president, Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1994 she was poisoned by a member of her own family who supported the president. She was 36. On the day I was born, one of my older sisters, who was only 3, died of sickle cell disease. My mother learned of her death as she was leaving the maternity ward. She left the hospital with a new child and a new grief to carry. My mother did not have much money. She sold water in plastic bags at the markets, and sometimes, when she had no choice, she left my other sister and me alone. On the day my mother died, I was 4. She had gone to a political meeting, after which she was supposed to pick us up. She never came home. After my mother’s death, I stayed with my aunt until I arrived in France to live with my father. I had never met him before. For the first few years, we lived in a 1,000-square-foot room in the Paris suburbs. It was very hard. I had been a good student, but now I was failing, and even though I was seeing a speech therapist, progress was slow.

Government officials are trying to avoid a repeat of last weekend’s unrest across the country, which injured police officers and damaged stores.

France is taking extensive measures to prepare for another expected wave of violence and protests on Saturday, a week after the country experienced some of the worst rioting it has faced in years. French President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, and Interior Minister Laurent Nunez have been on a public-relations blitz to prevent another […]

Early September in France is la rentrée, the “return” to school and work from the long summer vacation. The political season resumes too. This September, la rentrée began the final run-up to the April-May 2027 presidential elections. France has a long tradition of strikes and street protests. No one was surprised that public-sector unions marked […]

Demonstrations last week erupted into violence, including mass looting and cars being set alight, resulting in more than 2,000 arrests.

Riots in France have not only taken a turn for the worse, but they’ve also spread to other countries. But the violence on European streets isn’t organic. Rather, it’s the latest example of the Marxist Left exporting chaos abroad. Some in the press have attempted to portray the rioters as merely aggrieved students demanding better […]

An Italian priest gave a group of far-left rioters the middle finger in sign of resistance against the agitators who took over the streets of Milan under the guise of student protests, pillaging the city with violence and looting.