DOUGLAS MURRAY: If countries like France don't confront and remove those who hate them, there will be nothing left of them but a beautiful name

Whenever France burns, people look for precedents, the best comparison to the riots du jour.

People throw around dates such as 1968, or sometimes 2005. Those with longer memories cite 1848 or 1789.

Since the great General Strike of ’68, there has been a pretence that protests in France are somehow a traditional feature of rebellion against some aspect of the French system, or a wider injustice.

The current conflagration began somewhat in this manner, with the asinine claim that the riots now spreading across the cities that are the jewels of French civilisation are somehow ‘school protests’.

It does not take a historian to notice the current events do not look like school protests. Even if it were true that some students were protesting about their schooling, they would have no justification for doing so.

Last year, French government spending accounted for 57 per cent of gross domestic product, and French education spending is above average within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This is in a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio is 115 per cent. France is, if anything, spending too much on the education of its youth. Or rather, it is borrowing money to educate a generation, portions of which are now protesting against their expensive though clearly inadequate education.

When I say it does not take a historian to understand what is going on this month, I mean that identifying what is fuelling these protests requires nothing more than having eyes. Yes, there are students involved. But hardened adult rioters have moved in and stoked unrest to its current level of conflagration. The result has been apocalyptic scenes, including the burning down of the historic town hall in Limoges and the ransacking of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

A street in flames in Marseille... the appalling riots in France this week are led by far-Left activists, anti-capitalists, green activists and Palestine fetishists, writes Douglas Murray

Those responsible are not students demanding better mathematics instruction. They are far-Left activists, anti-capitalists, green activists and Palestine fetishists.

Importing generations of people who have no loyalty to or love for the country, many of whom desire to burn it down, has contributed to France’s climate of disorder. The snarky, Schadenfreude-filled nature of much of the international commentary is itself sickening.

‘The French voted for this,’ many online warriors have said as they watched tearful French shopkeepers trying to stop mobs from destroying their livelihoods.

But that is not true. The French public never voted for this. Like their counterparts across Europe, in Britain and in America, the public has consistently voted for governments that promised to secure the nation’s borders, maintain order on the streets, and prevent the civil-war scenarios so many people, inside and outside the country, have warned about.

Their leaders simply never heeded them, or failed trying.

And gosh, have there been warnings. In 2021, dozens of retired generals and high-ranking officers from the French army signed a letter warning that, unless the French government got control of the immigration and integration failures that had roiled their country, civil war was a possibility.

The government and media might have considered that these men had a point. But the French authorities took the other option, the same one chosen by governments across Europe – they shot the messengers. Not literally. They merely hounded the signatories, stripped many of their pensions, slandered them and more. This is the modern equivalent of carrying out a punishment beating pour encourager les autres.

Each time someone has tried to warn that France’s model is no model at all – except for disaster – the same response has followed. Whether the warnings have come from writers such as Renaud Camus and Michel Houellebecq or politicians ranging from ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls to the Right-wing leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, they have been met with silence, ostracism or persecution from the ruling class.

And yet it is so obvious.

More than any other country in Europe, France has suffered decades of attacks and riots linked to lax border and immigration policies and a failed integration policy. It has one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations relative to its size, yet rather than integrating these newcomers, the country has become a breeding ground for resentment and extremism.

France's ruling class seems to meet all warnings with silence – regardless of whether they come from the likes of Right-wing National Rally leader, Marine Le Pen, or ex-PM Manuel Valls

In just a couple of years, from 2015 to 2017, the country witnessed Islamist militants kill figures ranging from the nation’s most famous secularists – the journalists of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine – to Father Jacques Hamel, 85, whose throat was slit while celebrating Catholic Mass in a church in Rouen.

It has endured nights of terror, including in 2015, when Islamists attacked the Bataclan theatre, the main football stadium outside Paris, and cafes and restaurants. And it has seen the murder of teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist who beheaded him for the supposed crime of ‘blasphemy’.

Brutal, almost unimaginable acts of horror have occurred with grim regularity for years. There was the truck attack on Bastille Day in Nice. Then there was the 2022 murder of Lola Daviet, a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Paris, whose killer, an Algerian national living illegally in France, asphyxiated, tortured, stabbed and raped her before stuffing her into a suitcase. So unrelenting have the horrors of modern France been that one is reminded of Queen Gertrude’s line in Hamlet: ‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel / So fast they follow.’

And yet each new woe is passed over. No change is ever made.

French politicians have no answer to this. President Emmanuel Macron used his silky words to talk at the nation in a televised address on Sunday night, but he seems incapable of doing anything about the catastrophe.

Even after the police have lost control of the streets in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, and Parisians and others have been forced to protect their own homes, the president still refuses to declare a state of emergency.

His rivals on the Left and Right are no better. Socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon fans the flames because many of the rioters are his Left-wing supporters who believe violence always brings something constructive in its wake.

Le Pen tries to pander to what she imagines to be the political middle ahead of the next presidential election, refusing to call for the deportation even of those non-French nationals burning her country’s cities.

French politicians, commentators, activists and others have helped bring about this moment. But, like children who start a fire, they have no idea how to put it out. Almost all are running away – unequal to the moment and inadequate to the challenge.

The socialist Left is aligning politically with discontented immigrants, forming a movement large enough to vie for real power.

So I’m reminded of French author Paul Valéry and what he wrote in 1919 in his essay The Crisis Of The Mind: ‘We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics...

‘“Elam”, “Nineveh”, “Babylon” were but beautiful, vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But “France”, “England”, “Russia”... that these too would be beautiful names.

‘Now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilisation has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.’

France has forgotten Valéry’s wisdom. As its critics search for événements to compare these events with, they have ignored the simplest of facts: If you do not confront and remove those who hate you when they so amply demonstrate that hatred, then France too – even France – will become nothing more than a beautiful name.

A version of this article was originally published in The Free Press, where Douglas Murray is a columnist. Subscribe at thefp.com