By JONATHAN MILLER
As I stood in the queue at the fishmonger on the town square close to my home in the South of France yesterday, he was cutting the head off a sea bream with deft strokes of his razor-sharp knife.
‘You French have always been rather good at decapitation,’ I said, gesturing towards a spot outside the post office, where the town guillotine had stood in an earlier era. Nobody laughed. ‘They should bring the guillotine back,’ said the fishmonger. ‘We need it more than ever.’ He wasn’t joking and other customers nodded vigorously.
Like me, they’d spent much of the weekend watching news of the violence that broke out in Paris on Saturday night before spreading pretty much the length and breadth of the country.
The riots began after Paris Saint-Germain crushed Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League final. Before the game had ended, mobs were attacking police and setting fires on the Champs Elysees, with 264 cars torched.
One young man who was hit by a car died shortly afterwards. Rioters, including some waving Algerian and Palestinian flags, attacked the flagship Chanel boutique. Police made no fewer than 600 arrests.
The unrest quickly spread beyond Paris. In Normandy, a police officer gravely injured by fireworks was put into a medically-induced coma. A 17-year-old was stabbed to death in Dax in southwestern France.
The US State Department is now warning of terrorist attacks targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs and public areas.
France’s Vigipirate national security alert system is currently at its highest level, Urgence Attentat.
Translated, that means attacks are considered imminent and the estimated 10 million British tourists expected to holiday here this summer should be on their guard.
The riots began after Paris Saint-Germain crushed Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League final. Even before the game had ended, mobs were attacking police and starting fires on the Champs Elysees, writes Miller
Rioters,including some waving Algerian and Palestinian flags, attacked the flagship Chanel boutique during the chaos in Paris on Saturday. Police made no fewer than 600 arrests.
In the rural village where I live, our local policemen, normally unarmed, have been ordered to carry pistols. But the sense of anxiety runs much deeper than that.
At least 80 per cent of adults in my region have permits for guns, mostly used for hunting. In France as a whole, there are an estimated 12.7 million firearms in private hands, both legal and illegal.
Many joining the local gun clubs admit privately that they do this in case the worst happens and their weapons are needed for self-defence.
What is going on in Britain? Petty crime is rampant. Payment on the Underground seems to have become voluntary. There are occasional eruptions of civil unrest. But this bears little resemblance to what is happening in France.
The truth is France is a two-tier country. There is the charming, civilised nation that has been my home for more than 25 years, a land of magnificent countryside and chilled rosé. But another France has festered inside it and now threatens to consume it – a dystopia of grim tower blocks, from which unemployed, nihilistic youths emerge to loot and terrorise at any excuse.
A decade ago, I wrote a book called France: A Nation On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
It was criticised at the time for being alarmist. But the breakdown has happened.
Now I fear that a civil war is brewing and that, if police and politicians cannot control the problem, we will see prolonged violence on a scale that makes this week’s horrors appear trivial.
It’s an exaggeration to say that a full-scale civil war has already started, but there’s no doubt that a smouldering insurrection is being encouraged by an unholy alliance of hard-Left militants and extremist Islamists.
The social profile of those responsible for the violence is consistent, a reporter for upmarket daily Le Figaro observed on Monday as the first perpetrators appeared in court. He didn’t specify it but, then, he didn’t have to. Everyone knows the rioters are predominantly young males of North African origin.
But they are not the migrants in transit to the Channel coast on their way to Britain. They are the grandchildren of immigrants from Algeria and Morocco who arrived in France more than 60 years ago.
Their families came to France in search of opportunities. Their offspring are destroying it.
The Right-wing politician Eric Zemmour summed up the crisis in words that should give pause: ‘The violence on Saturday has nothing to do with football. It wasn’t comparable to English football hooliganism.
‘It is the first symptom of a civilisational guerrilla war. We need a major re-migration policy to restore peace in France.’
It’s unconstitutional in France to collect racial data on criminals but my police friends here are in no doubt who they are confronting and you only need to watch the video clips to see for yourself.
‘These incidents are very serious, unacceptable. We will pursue, we will punish, we will be relentless,’ President Emmanuel Macron said sternly on Sunday.
This was nonsense, of course. The first defendants were handed pitiful 500 euro fines – a stark contrast to the heavy prison sentences meted out to British rioters and those who helped to incite them on social media last summer.
The Israeli minister Amichai Chikli, infuriated by Macron’s promise to recognise a Palestinian state, posted a message on X (formerly Twitter): ‘@EmmanuelMacron, it seems that you’ve already established a Palestinian state in the middle of Paris. Bravo.’ That slap in the face must have stung even more than the one Macron received from his wife Brigitte on the presidential plane last month.
‘Why do the French love anarchy?’ asked a friend in London, as he watched the unrest on television.
My answer? They don’t. They hate it. Which is why law and order is going to be the decisive issue in the 2027 presidential election, now 22 months away, although the campaign has already started.
French voters are sick of the constant violent disturbances. In 2023, more than 5,000 cars were burned in a single week. Even when it’s ‘quiet’, more than 100 cars a day are set on fire. It’s no wonder that the foremost candidate for 2027 is the leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, who promises to crack down hard.
She is currently disqualified from seeking office after being convicted of diverting European Parliament funds to pay her party’s staff. If her appeal fails, her deputy, Jordan Bardella, will replace her.
The headlines are relentless: gang warfare in Marseilles, synagogues and holocaust memorials attacked in Paris, two prison officers murdered in an ambush at a motorway pay station.
A sinister development that makes this worse is the proselytising of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to undermine the French Republic and impose sharia law.
According to a classified report from the Ministry Of The Interior, leaked to Le Figaro, the Brotherhood has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France through schools, charities and mosques – infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.
Ultra-Left activists are openly exploiting the alienation.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of France Unbowed, who is building a coalition of the extreme Left and Islamism, portrays the rioters as victims of police brutality and government policies. This is classic Melenchon, a master of the tactic of inversion accusatoire (accusatory reversal), redirecting blame from the rioters to the state.
But figures show 74 per cent of French people believe there is a link between immigrants and crime, and 82 per cent want illegal residents deported.
Last month, a poll found 80 per cent of women want to see soldiers patrolling the streets.
A poll in March indicated that 69 per cent of people lack confidence in the government’s ability to protect the country, 42 per cent believe France is on the verge of a civil war and 39 per cent fear terrorist attacks are imminent on major government buildings, such as the Elysee Palace and National Assembly.
Nobody is more disgusted than the police, who risk their lives and soak up endless abuse for 2,000 euros a month. ‘The criminals have more rights than we do,’ one told me, reacting to news that rioters arrested at the weekend were already being released with little more than a telling-off.
Another gendarme was back after secondment to the beaches of Northern France, where she was supposedly on duty to stop people-smugglers launching their overcrowded dinghies to transport migrants across the channel. She said that, after some of her colleagues had disabled the inflatables with a box cutter, they were disciplined – for destruction of private property.
‘We used to arrest the migrants,’ she sighed, ‘but all we did was drop them off in downtown Calais. They were on the beach the next day. So, what was the point?’
The disorder in the cities is directly connected to the shambles on the Channel. Both signify a state that is losing control. But, as I have said, it is not new arrivals who burn the cars and stoke the riots.
That is done by the second and third generation immigrants, the ones whose parents arrived to work but failed to integrate. A couple of decades later, their children are completely disaffected and disconnected from education.
One friend of mine, a woman from Ireland, was hired as a temporary teacher in nearby Beziers to coach English, even though she’s not qualified.
The head explained they were desperate: their actual English teacher had been off work, suffering from stress, for two years. Of the 40 children in her class, she told me, perhaps three showed any interest in learning. The rest spent their days on their mobile phones playing video games.
‘I asked the principal what I should do about it,’ she said. ‘She replied: “Do nothing. It will just cause trouble.”’
These young people grow up in homes dependent on welfare, never expecting to find work. Their favourite expression is nique ta mere, a version of the American ‘mother****er’.
You might say they are merely young idiots – but they are being manipulated by people who are not idiots, to undermine French society. It is impossible to overstate how much the ultra-Left and their Islamist confreres detest everything about this country.
This was apparent ten years ago, when at least 1,200 French Muslim extremists travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for Islamic State. France’s ghettos were a fertile recruiting ground and not just those in Paris.
For example, 17 men from the small southern town of Lunel, population 27,500, were reported to have joined the IS terrorist army, with at least six of them killed.
A jihadist told Paris Match in 2015 that there were so many French recruits in Islamic State, ‘I couldn’t even count them all.’
It took The New York Times to sum up what was happening: ‘Alienation, thanks partly to joblessness and discrimination in blighted neighbourhoods; a turn to petty crime, which leads to prison, and then more crime and more prison; religious awakening and radicalisation; and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country like Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen to train for jihad.’
The president at the time, Francois Hollande, made a belated and inadequate attempt to monitor the surge in Islamism, following the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices in Paris, and mass killings at a school in Toulouse and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
He ordered more money for schools to teach lessons on ‘Republican values’ and secularism. This might have been France’s last hope of averting social disintegration – and it was squandered.
We are experiencing a new kind of hybrid chaos, in which the state loses control of portions of the ‘indivisible France’, a term enshrined in the constitution of the Fifth Republic.
In this new world, hordes of youths descend on the cities in eruptions of arson and looting. Meanwhile, thousands of migrants arrive from southern Europe and nobody even knows how many there are in France or who and where they are.
All this is in today’s headlines. What’s next will likely be worse.
Jonathan Miller lives in the south of France and is the author of France: A Nation On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (published by Gibson Square).
The 4th British Hussars around 1820
