France is burning again, and at some point we have to stop pretending this is normal. As many as 500 high schools are closed or partially closed because the government cannot guarantee their security. Twenty-four schools have reportedly been burned or ransacked and 78 education employees injured. In Paris, hooded individuals piled combustible material against the entrance of a school and set it on fire. When masked thugs are setting schools on fire, you are watching the breakdown of civil society.
The radical left has helped turn legitimate frustration into another excuse for confrontation with the state. What began with complaints about teachers and education spread through disadvantaged Paris suburbs before exploding into a nationwide movement, with authorities saying violent groups infiltrated demonstrations. This is the same political sickness we keep seeing across Europe: every grievance becomes justification for occupying something, smashing something, burning something, or attacking the police, while politicians are terrified to call it what it is because they have spent years romanticizing radicalism whenever it serves their political interests.
Then there is the immigration crisis that the French establishment has spent decades refusing to discuss honestly. France permitted large-scale immigration while failing miserably at integration in parts of the country. It allowed segregated suburbs to develop where poverty, unemployment, crime, alienation and distrust of the state became entrenched across generations. Immigration does not make someone violent, and the government has not established that migrants are responsible for all these attacks, but denying the enormous integration crisis surrounding many French banlieues has become absurd. You cannot import people indefinitely without ensuring they become part of the society they are entering and then act surprised when parallel communities emerge.
France has already seen where this road leads. The 2005 riots spread across the country as thousands of vehicles were burned and public buildings attacked. The 2023 riots produced another wave of arson, looting and destruction after the police killing of Nahel Merzouk. Now we are watching schools burned and hundreds more closed because authorities fear additional violence. How many times does the same country have to erupt before politicians admit there is a structural problem?
France is also running directly into the financial wall. The country has one of Europe’s largest welfare states, persistent deficits, enormous public debt, and rising borrowing costs. Yet every social failure produces demands for still more government spending. More teachers, more housing, more welfare, more policing, more subsidies, more integration programs and more reconstruction after the next riot. Nobody ever asks where the money comes from because the political class has spent generations pretending debt is free.
This is where uncontrolled immigration and sovereign debt eventually collide. Every additional person requires housing, schools, healthcare, transportation and infrastructure. A successful immigration policy expands the productive economy alongside the population and integrates newcomers into the nation. A failed policy increases demands on systems that are already strained while refusing to acknowledge capacity limits. France chose ideology over arithmetic and is now discovering that calling critics names does not create another classroom, apartment or hospital bed.
The radical left will blame capitalism, inequality, the police, austerity or whatever slogan is fashionable this week, but burning schools will not produce another teacher. Destroying public property will not improve education. Setting fire to the institutions your own community depends upon is not resistance. It is self-destruction.
Now children cannot even go to school because these idiots think they have some God given right to burn, smash and destroy an entire community whenever they are angry. They torch a school, destroy a bus stop, smash a storefront or burn somebody’s car and somehow imagine they have punished “the government.” The government does not reach into its own pocket and clean up the mess. The TAXPAYER does. The shopkeeper whose windows were smashed pays. The worker whose car was burned pays. The parents whose children are sitting at home because their school is closed pay. Then the same fools who destroyed their own neighborhoods complain that there are not enough teachers, services, or opportunities, as if money magically falls from the sky to rebuild everything they just burned. This is not protest and it is not some noble rebellion against the system. It is sheer stupidity, and the innocent people trying to work, raise families and send their children to school are being forced to pay for it.