France’s streets are burning. Its crisis was decades in the making, and the rest of the West is following the same path.
Kristijan Janković
Oct 19, 2026 - 10:39 AM
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France has just endured one of its worst days of unrest in years. Public buildings were attacked, shops were looted and fires burned across the country. According to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, around 2,400 people were arrested and nearly 1,000 police officers and gendarmes were injured.
The protests began over the cost of living and deteriorating public services. Hundreds of thousands marched peacefully. The French government blamed the violence on ultra-left groups and opportunistic criminals. Perhaps that partly explains who lit the fires. In any case it does not explain why the French state once again appeared unable to maintain order.
After thirty years in uniform, I have learned that strength is not simply a matter of numbers or equipment. A unit can have all the resources it needs and still fail if its members no longer share a clear sense of purpose. The same is true of a country. France’s latest riots exposed a country struggling with a problem: the erosion of common allegiance. That problem extends far beyond one weekend of violence.
Citizenship Is Not Integration
Does France still have the confidence to demand allegiance to France? A nation depends upon people who are willing to respect its laws, preserve its institutions and accept obligations towards one another. When that understanding disappears, the police are left to deal with the consequences.
Citizenship is a legal status. Ancestry is something else. Cultural belonging requires more: attachment to a country’s language, history and way of life. Naturalisation cannot provide all of that through an administrative decision. A passport may make somebody a citizen in law. It does not automatically make that person French in outlook, loyalty or identity.
Governments should not assume that residence inevitably produces attachment or that each succeeding generation will become more integrated. Integration must be achieved. It cannot simply be declared. Where separatist institutions cultivate competing loyalties, time may deepen the division. Issuing more citizenship certificates while ignoring that reality gives the government a reassuring statistic without solving the problem.
The scale matters. INSEE estimates that approximately eight million immigrants lived in France in 2025, representing 11.6 per cent of the population. It recorded 313,000 immigrant arrivals in 2024, with Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia the leading countries of birth. Numbers of that size require serious integration policies. It is not enough to speak of openness and assume that everything else will resolve itself. Immigration from developing countries, including Muslim-majority societies, brings genuine differences in language, institutions and attitudes towards the relationship between religion and public authority. Acknowledging those differences is not prejudice. It is the starting point for any serious integration policy.
Where political movements seek to place religious authority above national law, the response must be clear: French law governs France. Emmanuel Macron has admitted as much. In an October 2020 speech on separatism, he described Islamist separatism as a political and religious project seeking to create a parallel society and claim authority above republican law. He also acknowledged failed integration and the concentration of serious problems in particular neighbourhoods. That should have ended the pretence that citizenship on paper necessarily produces national cohesion.
When Accommodation Becomes Surrender
The problem remained serious enough for Macron to convene a Defence and National Security Council in July 2025 to address Islamism, separatism and institutional infiltration following a report on the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet France still treats immigration, integration and separatism as though they were separate subjects. They are not.
Multiculturalism breaks down when the state protects the demands of separate communities more enthusiastically than the common rules holding the country together. Accommodation becomes surrender when public authorities permit religious or political pressure groups to challenge basic rights.
Freedom of conscience, women’s equality and freedom of expression cannot vary from one neighbourhood to another. The same law must apply everywhere. France claims to believe in republican assimilation. The gap between that principle and everyday reality is becoming impossible to ignore. It is easy to declare that France is one Republic. Maintaining one Republic requires schools that transmit a common culture and officials who are willing to defend it.
The government says this weekend’s destruction was largely the work of ultra-left groups and criminals who saw an opportunity to loot. That may be partly true. But a label does not answer the more serious question: why were organised groups once again able to turn legitimate grievances into widespread disorder? Far-left activists and Islamists do not share the same vision of the future. They do not need to. Hostility towards the existing order can be enough to bring them together temporarily.
The political class cannot avoid responsibility for this. Governments set admission rules, naturalisation requirements and enforcement priorities. They cannot celebrate the generosity of their policies and then deny responsibility when institutions become overwhelmed. If France cannot integrate further arrivals, it should reduce immigration. If separatist networks are expanding, it should confront them. If rioters burn public buildings and loot shops, they should be prosecuted. That is government. Everything else is delay.
France Must Believe in France
France has the right to preserve its cultural continuity. Its language, Christian inheritance, literature and republican traditions are not embarrassing relics. They are the inheritance that each generation receives and passes on. They also give integration a destination.
What exactly are newcomers being asked to join if France is ashamed to define itself? A country that apologises for having an identity will struggle to persuade anybody else to embrace it. A common culture cannot survive if its own custodians refuse to defend it.
France needs credible borders and a serious integration policy. Immigration should correspond to the country’s demonstrated ability to absorb newcomers. Language proficiency and civic knowledge should be meaningful requirements, not formalities. Decisions to remove those without a right to remain should be enforced lawfully. Separatist organisations should be investigated. Where there is evidence of criminal activity or foreign interference, the state should act. Arson, assault and intimidation must be prosecuted regardless of the cause invoked by those responsible.
The risks faced by emergency workers are real. On September 29, a firefighter responding to a burning barricade near Bordeaux’s Lycée Montaigne was injured when an aerosol exploded. He had gone there to protect the public. Instead, he became another casualty of disorder. The state’s first responsibility is to make ordinary, lawful life possible. People should be able to walk through their neighbourhoods, run businesses and use public services without wondering whether the authorities will retreat when confronted.
Political leaders should be judged by results. Are integration policies working? Are separatist networks becoming weaker? Can the police enforce the law? Do citizens feel safe in public spaces? Those questions matter more than another speech about good intentions.
France’s Warning to the West
The cost of disorder is not limited to burned buildings and repair bills. Every unanswered act of intimidation teaches peaceful citizens that restraint counts for less than somebody else’s willingness to threaten. Every failure to respond encourages the next test.
When people stop believing that lawful institutions will protect them, the political consequences become much more dangerous. Order is not the enemy of liberty. Without order, liberty belongs only to those strong enough to defend themselves.
Police officers cannot rebuild a nation from behind their shields. Families, schools and political institutions must teach the same basic expectations: citizenship carries duties, belonging requires loyalty and disagreement does not provide a licence to destroy.
This weekend’s riots showed a French state struggling to preserve order while several crises collided at once. The rest of the West should pay attention. A country cannot admit more people than it can integrate, tolerate Islamist separatism, retreat from its own identity and assume that citizenship papers will somehow hold everything together.
France is showing us what happens when common allegiance begins to disappear. Ignore that warning, and the same future may be waiting elsewhere.