France

They’re coming for Michel Houellebecq again. The rumpled, chain-smoking laureate of misery is once more in the crosshairs of the French state for causing offense. I’ll give you one guess who he’s offended. That’s right: Muslims. Islam really has become the premier snowflake religion, a faith so exquisitely fragile that even a grumpy novelist puffing on a Gauloise in a Parisian cafe can give its clerics a fit of the vapors. If a faith cannot survive a mordant Frenchman calling it silly without going crying to the courts, then the problem is the faith, not those who mock it Houellebecq has been formally charged by a judge in Nanterre, near Paris, for comments he made in 2022.

The French Revolution remade not only France but Europe, some 230-odd years ago. Even Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo was not really the end of what the rebellious Estates General had set in motion in 1789. The Revolution proved that an ancien régime could be overthrown and, once that was demonstrated, no king anywhere could feel completely safe. The Revolution continued as an ideological struggle long after the shooting ceased. Indeed, the world wars of the 20th century were arguably a late phase of the processes begun by the Revolution. Now France faces a different kind of revolution: the prospect that Marine Le Pen will win next year’s presidential contest. Le Pen is considered absolutely haram by liberals everywhere, not only in her own country but throughout Europe.

It was a peaceful weekend in France apparently. One broadcaster described the latest protests as “calm” and Le Monde said they unfolded “without serious incident.” Tell that to the 53 police officers who were injured in clashes with demonstrators, 1,513 of whom were arrested as trouble broke out across the country. Laurent Nunez, the Interior Minister, said that in several towns and cities the police had been subjected  to an “extremely high level of violence.” This Saturday is Halloween and social media is full of threats and taunts about bringing terror to the Parisian bourgeoisie In Grenoble, for example, hundreds of far-left extremists were beaten back by police who resorted to tear gas and baton charges.

Given its corpulent government and inexplicably entitled populace, I’ve long been in awe of the fact that France functions at all. In the past four weeks, the verdict is belatedly in: it doesn’t. Early estimates of the riots: 1,500 shops damaged, destroyed and/or looted; 1,000 police officers injured; at least 1,800 arrests; innumerable cars burned; multiple architecturally irreplaceable public buildings set alight or vandalized. Two versions of the “unrest” have emerged. For the left-wing press, “mostly peaceful” minors protesting poor educational provision were joined by “mostly peaceful” adults protesting the cost of living – who were then infiltrated by masked outside “agitators” of totally unknown identity who looted and set stuff on fire.

Paris The wonderful thing about electric bikes, if you are fighting with French riot police, is the way they burn. You skid your Lime or Vélib’ into the middle of the Boulevard de Magenta, which leads from the Gare du Nord down to the Place de la République, and set it alight along with a pile of ordinary bikes, and soon you have a conflagration of rubber and battery chemicals. During the weekend’s street protests, the fires provided cover for rioters breaking into mobile phone, vape and jewelry stores and the money-transfer shops which serve the many immigrants who work in eastern Paris. By Monday morning, a vicious guard dog stood outside an Intermarché supermarket, snarling at customers coming in one by one.

On Bastille Day, 1883, the people of Limoges inaugurated a beautiful new town hall, paid for from the legacy of a rich burgher with no children. On Saturday, rioters set fire to it. “Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step.” That was Alain Finkielkraut, but I know it because Clive James quoted him when he wrote of how to keep our societies and values alive. He said we liked to think being cultured warded off barbarism, but that barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultured or not. He was only half right. Barbarism does care: it hates us for being cultured. Barbarism, whether imported or home bred, wants to see our culture burn.

On September 21, students at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, staged a protest. They had a list of grievances. Classes were overcrowded and there was a shortage of teachers. They were also dismayed at the decaying state of some of the school buildings and the automated university admissions platform they feel deprives them of autonomy. Students filmed the protest and uploaded the footage onto social media. It went viral. Across France, children in other secondary schools joined the protest. They aired the same complaints as their peers in Créteil – and more. Some students described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and moldy walls. For many, memories of the summer heatwave were still painfully fresh.