The riot before the storm

As dis­order engulfs Paris, the polit­ical centre col­lapses and Mar­ine Le Pen approaches power, France is run­ning out of money, patience and answers. Simon Kuper asks what hap­pens next

Financial Times Europe

Simon Kuper is author of ‘Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Cen­tury’

24 Oct 2026

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I live in Paris by the Place de la République, so last Sat­urday was lively. I spent the after­noon among the high school stu­dents demon­strat­ing with their revolu­tion­ary card­board signs. By 6pm, a dif­fer­ent crowd occu­pied the streets. Our court­yard reeked of police tear gas. Out­side, the boulevard was full of cas­seurs (wreck­ers), a group that his­tor­ic­ally accom­pan­ies French demon­stra­tions. I watched teen­age boys smash the shut­ters of the super­mar­ket across my street and pil­lage it, mostly for stuff they didn’t par­tic­u­larly want. One kid walked out cheer­ing with a crate of Volvic min­eral water. Oth­ers chucked around pack­ets of crisps. A higher-value rioter staggered out with arm­fuls of spir­its. Police were nowhere to be seen.

I con­sidered wad­ing in to defend the super­mar­ket as a one-man force of order, but decided against it. With my neigh­bours cower­ing inside, I was the only middle-aged per­son on the street. Not wear­ing a track­suit or hoodie, I looked sus­pect. One boy iron­ic­ally sug­ges­ted I call the police. Instead, I went back upstairs and spent the even­ing listen­ing to smash­ing glass.

In 25 years in Paris I’ve never seen such pub­lic dis­order, nor such extreme and uncom­prom­ising polit­ics. Polls pre­dict that far-right leader Mar­ine Le Pen — boos­ted by Sat­urday’s may­hem — will be elec­ted pres­id­ent on May 2, des­pite poten­tially cam­paign­ing in an ankle tag after being con­victed of embezz­ling European par­lia­ment­ary funds. This would be the far right’s first ascent to power in any of Europe’s big three of Ger­many, France or the UK since 1945. She could face a fin­an­cial crisis: France’s annual budget defi­cit has been stuck for years at about 5 per cent, bor­row­ing costs have hit 24-year highs and no polit­ical solu­tion is in sight. How did France reach the brink of ungov­ern­ab­il­ity, and where might it go?

In France, the first ques­tion to ask about revolu­tion­ary action is always: is this real or just the­at­rical? The French are raised to revere and re-enact their past upris­ings. Alexis de Toc­queville, describ­ing worse viol­ence in much the same neigh­bour­hoods in 1848, wrote, “here is the French Revolu­tion begin­ning over again, for it is always the same one”. The youth­ful pro­test­ers last Sat­urday hon­oured their fore­bears. “Be young and shut up”, read one sign, reusing the ironic slo­gan of 1968. They chanted the 1920s Italian slo­gan, “Siamo

tutti anti­fas­cisti”, and, “We decap­it­ated Louis XVI, we’re going to restart, Mac­ron”. Apart from any­thing else, they were hav­ing fun. It’s easy to mock the people who filmed Sat­urday’s protests and viol­ence, but all French revolu­tions are inten­ded, in part, as spec­tacles.

The French tend to talk rad­ical but act con­ser­vat­ive. This is a coun­try where 57 per cent are homeown­ers, and many people spend their lives look­ing for­ward to retire­ment. They rely on the state. Revolu­tion­ary lan­guage is in part just a bow to French her­it­age. Even many of the voters who backed rad­ic­als in past elec­tions quietly wanted an overedu­cated tech­no­crat to win. Then they could spend five years protest­ing against him. The 1968 “revolu­tion” cul­min­ated in the elec­tion of centreright­ist Georges Pomp­idou, product of the École Nor­male Supérieure.

But last Sat­urday was a dram­at­isa­tion of a new French polit­ical align­ment, in which tech­no­crats, with Mac­ron as their final incarn­a­tion, risk being chased from the stage.

High school stu­dents had been protest­ing for weeks against fail­ings in French edu­ca­tion. On Sat­urday, most of the demon­strat­ors rep­res­en­ted the far left. They were telling the indebted state to spend more. “We don’t have the means — liar” mocked one ban­ner. Their favour­ite tar­get, besides Mac­ron, was the police: “The whole world detests the police!” The pro­test­ers’ pat­ron is far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who tries to co-opt the street now that trade uni­ons no longer con­trol it. Cur­rently polling at about 17 per cent for the first round of next spring’s pres­id­en­tial elec­tions, he may reach the run-off against Le Pen.

The pro­test­ers barely referred to her, act­ing as if she didn’t exist. So did the small group of “ultra-left” “Black Bloc” mem­bers, who come to demon­stra­tions to attack the state. One of them may have helped burn down Limoges’ beau­ti­ful town hall.

The vast major­ity of “wreck­ers” are largely apolit­ical youths, many of immig­rant ori­gin but born in France, out for macho thrills. These were not the “Islamic extrem­ists” whom Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Net­an­yahu spoke of this week. Still, they did Le Pen’s work for her: their glee­ful destruc­tion provided a tableau of the dis­order she has always warned about. So the biggest pres­ence in the French polit­ical scene watched on Sat­urday from the gods, pre­par­ing to pose as the strong­wo­man who would restore order. Both she and Don­ald Trump have used the riots to attack immig­ra­tion.

On Sunday morn­ing, our local shop­keep­ers tot­ted up the dam­age. The guy who runs the Manga store where one of my sons used to buy his weekly stash told Le Par­is­ien: “It’s over. They took everything. My store was a free shop­ping centre. I was 17 when I came here, I’m 48 now, but the story ends here.” Some shop­keep­ers said they would arm them­selves. Oth­ers just cried.

In centre stage, Mac­ron’s state man­aged to appear sim­ul­tan­eously repress­ive and weak. The French riot police routinely use tear gas, stun gren­ades and rub­ber bul­let launch­ers, even against peace­ful school­chil­dren. The policy seems to be to do everything short of killing — France’s last two major riots, in 2005 and 2023, broke out after youths died in con­front­a­tions with police. Yet on Sat­urday, while the cas­seurs ran amok, des­per­ate shop own­ers phoning the police got no help.

Mac­ron has gov­erned as a high­han­ded leader — “Jupi­terian”, in his own descrip­tion — who rarely con­sults. Char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally, he didn’t meet the stu­dents to dis­cuss their griev­ances.

“Mac­ron’s Achilles heel is that he’s not good at deal­ing with nego­ti­ation,” Phil­ippe Aghion, the French eco­nom­ist who won last year’s eco­nom­ics Nobel, told me. “They don’t know how to deal with social move­ments. Or they don’t have the patience.”

Mac­ron looks as inef­fec­tual as his police. It’s hard to say now what he has achieved in almost a dec­ade in power: France’s eco­nomic growth has been anaemic as usual, and his biggest achieve­ment, a mod­est rais­ing of the pen­sion age from 62 to 64, later had to be frozen after oppos­i­tion. His approval rat­ing has hit an all-time low of 15 per cent, say poll­sters Ipsos Bva.

France cur­rently appears eco­nom­ic­ally ungov­ern­able. The gov­ern­ment has struggled even to pass budgets since Mac­ron lost his par­lia­ment­ary major­ity in 2024. His premier Sébastien Lecornu has called him­self “the weak­est prime min­is­ter of the Fifth Repub­lic”.

France’s defi­cits are becom­ing a slow­burn crisis. Pub­lic debt of 120 per cent of GDP would be man­age­able if par­lia­ment could agree to start cut­ting the defi­cit. Jean Tir­ole of the Toulouse School of Eco­nom­ics, the eco­nom­ics Nobel laur­eate for 2014, says: “I think what fin­an­cial mar­kets are wor­ried about is the fact that noth­ing is hap­pen­ing.” Pop­u­lar sup­port for bal­anced budgets appears weak. Gov­ern­ment spend­ing is 57.3 per cent of GDP, joint highest in the west­ern world with Fin­land, and Tir­ole notes that even with defi­cits of 5 per cent, many accuse Mac­ron of “aus­ter­ity”.

There’s another pres­ence on the French polit­ical stage, usu­ally glimpsed only in the shad­ows: Rus­sia. Unit 61240 of Rus­sia’s FSB secur­ity ser­vices spies on

France, and fre­quently launches cyber attacks. Rus­si­ans also spread mis­in­form­a­tion about everything from a sup­posed plague of bed­bugs to fake news about cent­rist can­did­ates. The French pres­id­en­tial elec­tion will keep Moscow busy. But Rus­sia hardly needs to stir the French pot given the quant­ity of fake news and con­spir­acy the­or­ies that France gen­er­ates indi­gen­ously.

The French have long been world cham­pi­ons of gloom in sur­veys, but Odoxa’s latest study registered a new record: 90 per cent are pess­im­istic about France’s eco­nomic future. They may finally be ready to gamble on rad­ic­al­ism. Book­makers make Le Pen odds-on favour­ite to become pres­id­ent.

That’s quite a turn­around for a party that long car­ried a whiff of Vichy. The Front National was foun­ded in 1972 by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, repeatedly con­victed of Holo­caust denial and incit­ing racial hatred. Le Pen père led the party until 2011 yet was always con­sidered an unelect­able extrem­ist, known as “the devil of the Repub­lic”.

His daugh­ter replaced him as leader, and later expelled him from the party and changed its name to Rassemble­ment National. She has con­duc­ted a suc­cess­ful cam­paign of so-called “dédiabolisation” — de-dev­il­isa­tion. Whereas her father admired Vichy’s leader Mar­shal Pétain, she hon­ours de Gaulle. She has cleansed the party’s state­ments of anti­semit­ism, although it keeps pop­ping up unof­fi­cially. The invest­ig­at­ive web­site Mediapart accuses her deputy Jordan Bar­della of mak­ing anti­semitic online com­ments as a teen­ager, something he denies. The party’s former par­lia­ment­ary vice-pres­id­ent Car­oline Par­men­tier faces sim­ilar accus­a­tions; she denies anti­semit­ism.

Le Pen attacks Muslims and non­white immig­rants, not Jews. Brit­ish his­tor­ian Julian Jack­son, author of the bio­graphy of de Gaulle that inspired the biopic seen this sum­mer by mil­lions of French people, says: “The dis­tan­cing from Vichy doesn’t mean they’ve dis­tanced them­selves from the form of nation­al­ism, of which Vichy was one example, which I would broadly call exclu­sion­ary, anti-for­eigner, inward­look­ing. The lan­guage they use about immig­rants and Muslims is so sim­ilar, if you look at the way the extreme right of the ’30s talked about Jews. You just change Jew to Muslim, you’d get the same: ‘They can’t integ­rate into France, they have double iden­tity, they don’t belong to us.’ I think it’s totally super­fi­cial, the clean-up.”

Some still con­sider the RN the “devil of the Repub­lic”. But now there are rival dev­ils. Mélenchon has that status for most in the centre and far right, and Mac­ron for far left and far right. This tar­nishes every­one asso­ci­ated with Mac­ron’s project. Until recently, the broad centre’s best hope for beat­ing Le Pen was Mac­ron’s former prime min­is­ter, Édo­uard Phil­ippe. But he’s polling at about 15 per cent. Book­makers give centre-left can­did­ate Raphaël Glucks­mann about a one-in-20 chance. Aghion is hop­ing for the emer­gence of “a fig­ure . . . a kind of new de Gaulle”.

For now the ques­tion has become how Présidente Le Pen might gov­ern. Many pre­dict Mel­on­isa­tion: that faced with the real­it­ies of power, Le Pen will mod­er­ate, like Italy’s sup­posedly far-right Prime Min­is­ter Gior­gia Mel­oni. But Marion Van Renterghem, author of the new book Femmes extrêmes, about Mel­oni, Le Pen and Ger­man far-right leader Alice Weidel, emphas­ises French-Italian dif­fer­ences. Van Renterghem says Italy’s mod­er­ate Pres­id­ent Ser­gio Mat­tarella “lim­its Mel­oni’s aspir­a­tions and speech. She’s also lim­ited by hav­ing to hold a coali­tion together. And Mel­oni is pro­foundly attached to the Atlantic alli­ance.”

More fun­da­ment­ally, notes Van Renterghem, Italy has no past as a global power. France does. And Le Pen, like de Gaulle, places her­self in that tra­di­tion. She will dis­tance her­self from what remains of the west­ern alli­ance.

That means first of all abandon­ing European sup­port for Ukraine. Le Pen says she will stop French fin­an­cial aid to Kyiv within six months of tak­ing power because France can’t afford it. “The hon­est thing to do with [Ukrain­ian pres­id­ent Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is to . . . warn him in fact that, listen, we can’t do more,” she told the FT this month.

Europe is another divide between Mel­oni and Le Pen. Mel­oni has been pro-European largely because the EU has gran­ted and lent Italy €166bn from its Next Gen­er­a­tion fund, notes Cath­er­ine Fies­chi, author of Pop­u­lo­cracy and long­stand­ing expert on the RN. By con­trast, France is the EU’s second-largest net con­trib­utor. Le Pen wants to cut its pay­ments, curb the European Com­mis­sion’s powers, and push the European Cent­ral Bank to fin­ance large-scale bor­row­ing. “If you read Le Pen’s auto­bi­o­graphy, there’s a real detest­a­tion of the EU,” says Van Renterghem.

Le Pen will also seek con­flict with French Muslims, other immig­rants, and even French cit­izens of immig­rant ori­gin. She plans to hold a ref­er­en­dum on chan­ging the con­sti­tu­tion to give French cit­izens “national pref­er­ence” for social hous­ing, wel­fare and gov­ern­ment jobs. (This would break European law).

France already bans the hijab for girls at school; Le Pen wants to ban it for adult women in pub­lic places, too. This raises the spectre of police patrolling the streets order­ing women to remove their veils. Many police might be keen. The poll­sters Sci­encesPo Cevipof estim­ated that 67 per cent of sol­diers and police voted RN in the second round of legis­lat­ive elec­tions of 2024.

Will Le Pen seek a con­front­a­tion with mar­kets, too? Maybe even she doesn’t know. “She doesn’t under­stand a damn thing about eco­nom­ics,” snorts Aghion.

Her eco­nomic pos­i­tions seem con­tra­dict­ory. This month, sud­denly sound­ing extremely ser­i­ous about the debt, she pro­posed hold­ing a ref­er­en­dum on a “golden rule” that would force par­lia­ment to pass only budgets com­pat­ible with shrink­ing the pub­lic debt-to-GDP ratio. Sim­ul­tan­eously, she touts some tax cuts and spend­ing increases.

For France, “pre­ven­tion”, choos­ing to move towards a bal­anced budget, would be pain­ful but the best option, says Tir­ole. Con­tinu­ing to run high defi­cits risks a fin­an­cial crisis. That’s often the moment when polit­ical parties and cit­izens embrace real­ity and accept cuts. In 2015, Greece took a third bail­out from the European Sta­bil­ity Mech­an­ism that locked in tough fiscal tight­en­ing.

However, there’s a third route: France could become Argen­tina. That would mean default­ing on debt and elect­ing nation­al­ist gov­ern­ments that fight with mar­kets. Some French voters appear temp­ted. Tir­ole was shocked that Mélenchon’s pro­posal not to repay the part of the national debt held by the French cent­ral bank “took centre stage in France for days and weeks”. Tir­ole calls this “wish­ful think­ing”.

He says: “If we went the Argen­tinian way, we would lose Europe. We would have to quit the Euro­zone, go back to the franc. A default, by the European treat­ies, is not allowed . . . I just don’t see Ger­many say­ing, ‘OK, we’re going to help France keep hav­ing defi­cits and retir­ing at 62.’”

I’m writ­ing this with a sur­veil­lance heli­copter fly­ing over my neigh­bour­hood. The super­mar­ket across the street remains boarded up and closed. For this Sat­urday’s demon­stra­tions, the gov­ern­ment is deploy­ing mil­it­ary troops. But what’s com­ing next year could make 2026 seem tran­quil.

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Financial Times Europe

24 Oct 2026

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