Welcome to the Conversation
After weeks of protests and a weekend of riots in which a town hall was set ablaze, 2,000-plus shops were looted, 2,300 people were arrested and 1,000 police injured, the repercussions for France – for its society and its economy – continue. Allegations of police brutality surfaced, and the violent protests unnerved investors, resulting in a debt sell-off, with borrowing costs rising higher than for Greece. All of this ahead of a hotly contested presidential election that’s now just six months away.
The French government’s escalating financial problems were covered by the Guardian’s Europe correspondent Jon Henley who wrote: “France’s national debt, at 119% of GDP, is at its highest level since 1946. Its budget deficit, at 5.1%, is also among the highest in the EU. There is just no money in the bank to ease the cost of living squeeze that brought 550,000 people on to the streets on Saturday.”
Columnist Paul Taylor commented that “Last weekend’s violence has increased the likelihood of a law-and-order backlash among voters that could propel (Marine) Le Pen into the Élysée Palace. But if the financial situation worsens and the campaign turns on who can save the economy, she may yet lose out to a candidate who is firm on security and more orthodox on fiscal policy.”
And the Guardian’s editorial noted that “In an increasingly febrile atmosphere, France is heading towards a seismic reckoning in May. Alarmingly, the civil strife witnessed at the weekend may only be a foretaste of what is to come.”
What are your views on the riots, their causes and their aftermath? Are they paving a path to the presidency for Le Pen? In his final months in charge, can embattled incumbent Emmanuel Macron meaningfully address the situation in which France finds herself?
France-based Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst will be live here at 1500BST today to answer your questions on what happened, why, and where France goes from here.
Post your questions in the comments below or email conversations@theguardian.com
Key events
Do the protests this month compare with May ’68?
Eamon McCrisken notes: Comparisons are being made with May 1968 but I think the following should be borne in mind from those times:
‘De Gaulle and Pompidou warned the country was threatened with a Communist coup. De Gaulle announced a snap election, calling upon the French to choose between legitimate government and revolutionary anarchy. The May Events in France were curiously peaceful by the standards of revolutionary turbulence elsewhere, or in France’s own past. The French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, it was above all a victimless revolution.’
(Tony Judt, Postwar)
Rokhaya: This comparison reminds me how familiar the political framing sounds: a social movement with concrete grievances is presented as a threat to the nation, and the public is asked to choose between the government and chaos. That framing allows those in power to elude questions about their own policies and responsibility for the escalation, as it is the case for the current protest.
May 1968 was not really “victimless”: people died during the May–June events, including striking workers at a Peugeot factory in Sochaux. Relative restraint compared with other historical upheavals should not erase those deaths.
France’s relationship with nostalgia is also something that can be underlined. We celebrate past rebellions while treating those protesting in the present as dangerous or irresponsible. We should take their demands seriously now, while they can still be answered and not wait for the future to romanticise them.
Alexander: Part of me loves to talk about national mythologies and how they can also become our national pathologies, and part of me hates it because I know I’ll inevitably end up reducing and simplifying things because I haven’t, unlike Tony Judt, written a chef d’oeuvre like Postwar on it.
But to go there anyway, if the US mythology has a large dose of “someday I can get rich, too” in it, I think the French mythology has a dose of “someday, I too can overthrow a despotic government”. I obviously wasn’t around in May 1968, and I didn’t grow up in France, but it does often seem to me like every generation wants to have its own “Revolution” that then cements its place in the national narrative. The country obviously has a high propensity for large-scale street protests and confrontations that don’t really happen in the same way as the US or UK. Lately, I’ve been wishing the US would take some inspiration from the French. But is the confrontational nature of French politics a sign of it working, or a sign that it’s not really working? I’d lean towards the latter.
Welcome to the Conversation
After weeks of protests and a weekend of riots in which a town hall was set ablaze, 2,000-plus shops were looted, 2,300 people were arrested and 1,000 police injured, the repercussions for France – for its society and its economy – continue. Allegations of police brutality surfaced, and the violent protests unnerved investors, resulting in a debt sell-off, with borrowing costs rising higher than for Greece. All of this ahead of a hotly contested presidential election that’s now just six months away.
The French government’s escalating financial problems were covered by the Guardian’s Europe correspondent Jon Henley who wrote: “France’s national debt, at 119% of GDP, is at its highest level since 1946. Its budget deficit, at 5.1%, is also among the highest in the EU. There is just no money in the bank to ease the cost of living squeeze that brought 550,000 people on to the streets on Saturday.”
Columnist Paul Taylor commented that “Last weekend’s violence has increased the likelihood of a law-and-order backlash among voters that could propel (Marine) Le Pen into the Élysée Palace. But if the financial situation worsens and the campaign turns on who can save the economy, she may yet lose out to a candidate who is firm on security and more orthodox on fiscal policy.”
And the Guardian’s editorial noted that “In an increasingly febrile atmosphere, France is heading towards a seismic reckoning in May. Alarmingly, the civil strife witnessed at the weekend may only be a foretaste of what is to come.”
What are your views on the riots, their causes and their aftermath? Are they paving a path to the presidency for Le Pen? In his final months in charge, can embattled incumbent Emmanuel Macron meaningfully address the situation in which France finds herself?
France-based Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst will be live here at 1500BST today to answer your questions on what happened, why, and where France goes from here.
Post your questions in the comments below or email conversations@theguardian.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/oct/21/france-riots-protests-reader-questions-rokhaya-dallio-alexander-hurst
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