Early last week, I participated in my first protest march in France. Well, technically, I didn’t really protest. I was on one side of the street and had to cross to the grocery store on the other side, pushing through tens of thousands of protesters between me and there. So I had to wade into the crowd and walk with them for about a block to make it to the other side without being trampled.
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The group was mostly kids in their late teens to mid-twenties, but there were more than a few Boomers. There were cardboard signs, Che Guevara shirts, and Palestinian flags. Nonetheless, everyone was chatting and smiling and seemed to be having a great time. A few people wore black and balaclavas, but not many.
Later that evening, I heard a couple of faint explosions. I didn’t really think much of it because there’s construction around. Only later, when I was on X, did my feed start to fill with the chaos. There were videos of a line of cops running toward a bunch of rioters. On closer inspection, I noticed it was literally on the very street I’d been on a few hours earlier, a block away. I was a bit surprised because the crowd that I had made my way through had been so…well…happy and polite.
But that’s the way things seem to work here. You have protesters who may or may not have legitimate grievances—honestly, usually not, but everyone loves a good protest march that gets them out of school or work—followed by the violent thugs.
And that’s exactly what they are. These thugs were throwing rocks at the police, breaking windows of stores of every kind—never bookstores—and stealing everything inside—except the ham from supermarkets. They attacked police, started fires in trash bins, broke the glass of bus stops, and set bikes and cars on fire.
I walked down the street the next day, and piles of glass and marks on the asphalt showed where the electric bicycles had been set ablaze, the same spot where I’d seen flames on X the night before.
Little did I know that was just a warm-up.
I watched Saturday night as reports came in from around the country of rioting. In Lyon, rioters set the Office of Tourism ablaze. In Limoges, they largely destroyed the city hall that had been standing since 1883. Across the country, hundreds of police were hurt, countless cars were set ablaze, and thousands of hoodlums were arrested.
On Sunday afternoon, I walked to République, the main area of chaos in Paris and home to the Monument à la République, a monument to the French Republic. Ironically, it features three allegorical statues representing Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité, or Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood.
The damage was considerable, even after almost 12 hours of bulldozers and cleaning crews working to make the place habitable. As I walked by five-foot-high piles of burnt bicycles and empty stores with man-sized holes smashed into their glass doors, and saw owners screwing sheets of plywood onto their storefronts, I couldn’t help but think about that old adage: “The left can build nothing. All they can do is destroy what others have built.”
That reality hit home as I watched a man in tears explain to his neighbor the damage done to his store.
And that right there is the problem. None of those thugs, nor the worthless politicians who enable them, have even the remotest love for France or its history or its people. Whether it’s the Communists or the Muslims, they don’t care about the greatness of France—which, regardless of what you think of it today, was monumental in the development of Western civilization, in terms of art, science, and architecture, as well as the philosophy of freedom.
This red/green cabal could never build anything of the scale or beauty of the Louvre, or Limoges’ city hall, or the thousands of churches that have been damaged, torched, or destroyed over the last decade. Nor, for that matter, could they match the extraordinary contributions from the likes of Voltaire, Pasteur, the Montgolfier brothers, or Marie Curie. But building has never been their goal, at least not in the sense of building anything other than their own power.
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A knee-jerk reaction would be to blame this on the millions of Muslims who have flooded into the country since 2016. That would be accurate, but only partially true. There were already millions of Muslims in France who, despite being born there, have just as little respect for it as the newcomers.
And then there are the Reds…the Communists, who are only the most extreme elements—not to be confused with a tiny minority—of a population that has grown soft on decades of deficit-powered socialist coddling (and American protection) and forgotten where freedom and prosperity come from in the first place.
What we’re seeing is exactly what happens when a nation loses its self-confidence, when its leaders, educators, and journalists convince its citizens they’re to blame for the world’s problems, that the nation their forefathers built is morally bankrupt, and that the idea of earned wealth is gauche or even repulsive.
France is known as the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, reflecting its long history of Christian devotion. Today, that’s largely gone, and as a result, the French—like much of the West—have little problem with the flooding of their nation with those who hate Christianity and seek to destroy it, whether in the form of Muslims or Communists.
Add to that the disdain with which capitalism is seen, and you have something of an intellectual and cultural Molotov cocktail in that red/green alliance.
And we’re seeing exactly that—both literally and figuratively—play itself out on France’s streets today. This is what happens when those two ideologies work together in their pursuit to fundamentally eviscerate Western civilization.
They don’t care what they destroy, they don’t care who they hurt, and they don’t care about the damage they do to society as a whole. Their goal is to burn France—and the West—to the ground so that they can rule over the ashes. Although the ashes part is optional.
Like Mehmed II, who, after conquering Constantinople, turned the Hagia Sophia—the great Eastern Orthodox cathedral—into a mosque, or the Bolsheviks who took over the Kremlin, they’re more than happy to keep some of the trappings of a vanquished civilization for their own glorification, but that’s a good thing to have, not a necessity.
The (relative) hellscape I saw in Paris on Sunday is an omen of things to come. From shattered windows to shattered lives, the red/green alliance can and will destroy everything in its path, and as history has shown, agitators only get more brazen the more they’re coddled.
Emmanuel Macron’s milquetoast response to the worst riots in years does not bode well for the future. What the French need is a leader who loves France, its history, and its values, and most importantly, understands what’s at stake.
It is France. It is Western civilization. It’s actually possible to win a war, but not if you refuse to even recognize you’re in one…
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Image created using AI.