This is not going to be an easy week for the French police. More than 200,000 people are expected on the streets today in “Act 5” of the high school protest, and on Saturday the Gilets Jaunes will join a demonstration about the cost of living crisis.
The extreme-left and their anarchist allies are set on disorder
There will be violence. There was on Monday, which was supposed to be a relatively quiet day in preparation for today. It was anything but. In a school in Aubagne, in the south of the country, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding two teachers and terrifying his classmates. Police are still working to establish a motive.
Elsewhere in France, eight teachers were assaulted by protesters. In total, more than seventy of their profession have been physically harmed since the movement erupted in the middle of last month.
The violence has intensified as the scale of the school protest has diminished. This is no coincidence. Initially, the barricades were manned by pupils who wanted to peacefully make the point that their schools and their needs had been neglected for too long.
Then the extreme-left moved in, hijacking the movement as they did in 2018 with the Gilet Jaunes protest. There have been allegations that most of the violence seen across France – whether it’s assaulting teachers or burning down buildings – is the work of various extreme-left organizations.
Three former prime ministers have accused Jean-Luc Melenchon’s far-left party La France insoumise of exploiting the crisis. “They want to stoke this anger, hijack it, and pervert it,” claimed Gabriel Attal, in a speech at the weekend. “By spreading vile insinuations against the police, by legitimizing violence, by calling for riots, by turning young people into political cannon fodder.”
This view was echoed by Michel Barnier on Monday. He charged LFI with “seeking to test its own networks, to test the police, and also to test its ability to create an atmosphere of insurrection across the country.”
In the view of Edouard Philippe who, like Attal, is running for the presidency next year, the extreme-left have a plan: “What they are setting us up for is widespread confrontation.”
In other words the violence that has erupted in the last fortnight is a prelude to the revolt that will occur next spring if – when, if the polls are right – Marine Le Pen becomes president. LFI have admitted as much themselves. Earlier this year Mathilde Panot, the party’s leader in parliament, declared that LFI “will never accept fascism coming to power legally through the ballot box, which is what Marine Le Pen wants to do.”
One of the party’s rising stars, Bally Bagayoko, went further, warning of a “popular uprising” in the event Le Pen wins the presidency.
By the end of last week the school protest was petering out. Of France’s 3,700 secondary schools, only 141 were closed on Friday because of security concerns. Pupils had returned to the classroom, either frightened off the picket line by aggressive outsiders or placated by the government’s promise to address their concerns.
Instead, the protest had spread to universities, such as Nantes, where a group of militants occupied the buildings for a number of days. By the time police removed them, they had damaged 30 classrooms, four laboratories and five lecture halls. Graffiti was everywhere, including the hammer and sickle and anarchist symbols. Police also discovered bags of human excrement, stockpiled as weapons to be used against them.
The police are braced for trouble on Tuesday, despite a call on Monday by Emmanuel Macron for the protest to be conducted “in an orderly manner and with respect for both people and property.”
The extreme-left and their anarchist allies are set on disorder. They have no respect for the president, the Republic, its institutions and most of its people. This seems to have passed the United Nations by. In a naïve declaration last week, Shabia Mantoo of the UN human rights office said: “We call on everyone to ensure that they remain peaceful and that there is no disproportionate use of force by law enforcement.” What about the teachers who have been assaulted? The passers-by who have been set on fire? The shopkeepers whose premises have been pillaged?
There have been a very small number of disproportionate police responses but they are the exception. The reality is that only a thin blue line stands between France and complete anarchy.
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