The Riots In France Are A Warning For America

The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.

The unrest, which quickly spread from the suburbs of Paris to encompass much of the country, were a stark contrast to the scenes just a few days earlier when Pope Leo XIV drew massive crowds at every stop on his four-day papal visit. Some 800,000 people lined the Avenue des Champs-Élysées for an open-air Mass in Paris, catching the media and civil authorities by surprise. France is supposed to be a secular country, after all.

But the pope’s popularity on the one hand, and on the other, the riots that erupted across France a few days after his departure, illustrate the extent to which France today is not a single country or nation. It is not one people. There is ancient France, the true France, which despite the French Revolution and state-enforced secularism is still deeply Catholic, “the eldest daughter of the Church.” That is the France that showed up for Pope Leo.

The other France is the one we saw rioting in the streets last week. News reports said the unrest began in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, over the poor condition of the public schools, and that disaffected high schoolers, fed up with overcrowded classes and dilapidated buildings, took to the streets spontaneously. From there, the rioting supposedly spread organically across the entire country in a matter of days.

There are a few problems with this narrative, beginning with the images and footage of the riots posted all over social media. What we see are not protests of the state of public education, but the wanton destruction of schools, violent attacks on firefighters and police and even teachers, and all the indications of central organization and planning.

Among the “protesters,” we don’t see a broad cross-section of French society but overwhelmingly nonwhite males, immigrants and the children of immigrants. The barricades are being raised largely by Muslims of North African and Middle Eastern descent. Outside many schools, students weren’t chanting about funding cuts or classroom conditions, they were chanting “we are antifascists” and other such slogans. In Marseille, rioters flew the flag of Algeria and Hamas, not the tricolor. It was the same at a number of high schools that saw rioting. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, and who is behind the unrest.

This is the Red-Green alliance of the socialist/Antifa left and Muslim immigrants, operationalized to bring the country to its knees through widespread rioting ahead of national elections next year. Indeed, the office of France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, on Friday made public that French intelligence is assessing the riots as orchestrated by proxies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), or LFI. Mélenchon, who has denied LFI’s involvement, is running for president. 

In short, what is happening in France is that the communists and the Muslim migrants are joining forces, testing their strength on the eve of national elections. It might be illegal to say so in France, but these are ethnic riots, a show of force by unassimilated Muslim migrants and their hard-left revolutionary allies, who believe they are strong enough to overpower the native majority.

France has always been a tangle of contradictions and a center of spiritual conflict. It was the heart of Catholic Europe but also the cradle of revolutionary terror. It has been both the defender of Christendom and the Catholic Church’s greatest enemy, home of both the Jacobins and the Vendée. Today it is the same: a nation whose majority is still defined by its Catholic faith and heritage, but whose leaders have opened the country to civilizational enemies from the Muslim World that seek to destroy the true France and replace it with something else.

But this isn’t just about France. The events unfolding across the Atlantic should cause alarm to us here in America, because the same forces at work there are at work here. An alliance of leftist and Muslim immigrants are emerging as a potent political force in the United States. This alliance is responsible for elevating people like Zohran Mamdani to the mayorship of New York City. It’s responsible for the U.S. Senate candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

Muslim immigrants to the West of course do not share everything in common with the radical left. Especially on issues like women’s right, transgenderism, gay marriage and the sexual revolution in general, they are not aligned. But those are disagreements for another day. For now, they are aligned above all in their desire to tear down western institutions and the Christian faith on which they were built. 

What that will look like in America we have yet to see in full. But if you want to get a rough idea, look at the riots in France. If we don’t put an end to Muslim immigration, that’s what our future holds.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.