France has lost the ability to assimilate Muslims from Africa and the people of France are watching their Republic literally burn as a result. Until this problem can be solved, France should end immigration from Muslim populations. But even if it did, which I do not think it will, a significant number of Muslims have already taken root within the country and will continue to grow in number and break shit.
The country is currently in crisis as riots rage nationwide, people are having their faces burned in public and their heads slammed into concrete, and the spineless media is simply reporting it all as a dispute over the economy, with scarcely any mention of Islam or African immigration. Now as a result, French students cannot even go to class because about 400 schools across the country are closed. And this all erupted within just a few weeks.
Last month, France’s major unions called a National Day of Action to protest proposed budget cuts and to push for higher taxes on the wealthy. This led to marches, school blockades, and two cars set on fire. Most of the unions involved were socialist, but the General Confederation of Labour and the Fédération syndicale unitaire have communist roots. To put these groups in an American context, they fit within the same ideological ecosystem as the Democratic Socialists of America, those clowns who want to get rid of the Constitution, abolish police and prisons, and who think being physically fit is a form of racist “body fascism.” These French groups have reasonable pro-labor goals, but they blend them with similarly woke social justice beliefs. Once their protests kicked off, they then helped national student unions, which are run primarily by high schoolers, organize companion protests. These student unions are cut from the same ideological cloth. One of the main ones, Union syndicale lycéenne, describes itself not in terms of seeking a better education, but as “antifascist, feminist, environmentalist …” you get the idea. So they joined the fray, issuing their own demands: no more overcrowded classrooms, lighter class schedules, reform of the university admissions system, and renovations of deteriorating schools.
Except classes are not overcrowded. The average classroom in a French high school contains 30 students, compared to 21 students in the United States. Nor is their class load particularly heavy. French students face 5.5 hours of instruction each day, compared to 5 or 6 hours in the United States. As for the university admissions system, it’s not that they are put through grueling testing, such as Chinese students prepping for the gaokao, but simply that they are placed on ranked waiting lists without knowing whether they’ll get into their preferred school. It’s not that the system is unfairly difficult, but that these students are struggling to compete. I am sure some of these students are diamonds in the rough who are not being afforded the opportunities they need to thrive. And that is a tragedy that demands attention. But also, some of these kids are just terrible pupils. As one student complained, “We can’t sleep in class because the teachers aren’t happy about it.” Finally, there’s the claim that the schools are in terrible condition. But have a look for yourself:
On Sept. 29, high schoolers across France barricaded their schools. Within days, the protests had exploded into nationwide riots. Masked teens set buildings and cars on fire, smashed windows, looted shops, threw paving stones at police, and attacked passersby on the street. These are not your average student protesters. America recently saw college campuses flooded with pro-Palestinian protests, and some of those did result in violence. But for the most part, they took the form of encampments. These French riots, by contrast, are extremely violent. And not just in the sense of students punching people or shoving officers to the ground. One rioter set a woman’s face on fire with a flamethrower. Multiple students have thrown hydrochloric acid at officers. One teen blew his hand off by picking up a dispersal grenade to throw at officers. And here’s a video of students “protesting” the “terrible conditions” of their schools:
Responding to the riots, the group Stand Up to Racism posted, “Revolt is spreading in France and antiracism is at its core,” along with a video of students at Henri IV School in Paris singing, “We are all antifascists.” What does a school protest have to do with racism? This is because many of the rioters are African immigrants, or the children of African immigrants, and people are starting to observe that fact. The current riots began with blockades outside Paris in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and Seine-Saint-Denis, home to the highest share of immigrants of any department in France, has remained their epicenter. But instead of having a hard conversation about immigration policy, the left is simply calling people racist for noticing. Even the government has blamed the far-left France Unbowed for stoking the protests. As i24 News reported:
Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, and Pantin were among the centers of the unrest in Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris. Immigrants accounted for roughly 32% of the department’s population in 2020–2021, according to national statistics agency INSEE. French-born residents with at least one immigrant parent accounted for a further 32%.
France’s suburbs have repeatedly been the starting point for nationwide unrest involving young people from immigrant families. In 2005, three weeks of riots followed the deaths of two teenagers of African descent hiding from police in an electricity substation. In 2023, the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, a teenager of North African descent, triggered another wave of violence.
“If you believe antiracism is the cause of the riots in France,” wrote philosopher Peter Boghossian, “you are retarded.”
This is not a criticism of Muslim Africans as a group. I admire the military leader Emir Abdelkader, who bravely resisted the French conquest of Algeria and protected thousands of Christians during the 1860 Damascus massacres. I adore Assia Djebar, the Algerian-born Muslim novelist and historian who became one of France’s most prominent literary figures, even serving in the Académie française, as well as a renowned feminist who was often considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and who I think should’ve beaten out Doris Lessing in 2007. And while I don’t care much for football, one of my favorite moments in the sport is when the Algerian-French player Zinedine Zidane head-butted another player for insulting his mother and his sister. For me, this was more satisfying to see than even Diego Maradona’s “goal of the century.” So I like Algerian Muslims. I am not aiming this criticism at Africans as a group either, or Muslims as a group. But the cases above are not the only ones worthy of consideration.
In Paris in 2022, an Algerian murdered a 12-year-old girl. In Annecy in 2023, a Syrian refugee stabbed toddlers in a playground. In Arras, the teacher Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death at his school and three others were wounded by one of his former students, Mohammed Mogouchkov. In Paris that year, a German tourist was stabbed to death and two people were hurt by a French-born Iranian with a prior terrorism conviction who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Crépol, a 16-year-old was stabbed to death during a village dance by young men from a Romans-sur-Isère housing project. In Rouen in 2024, an Algerian man tried to set fire to a synagogue and was shot dead by police. In La Grande-Motte that year, an Algerian man set several fires at a synagogue and a police officer was injured by an explosion. In Mulhouse last year, an Algerian man killed a 69-year-old Portuguese man and injured six others, including two police officers. Macron called it an “Islamist terror act.” The attacker, Brahim Abdessemed, had been in France illegally for over a decade. The government was fully aware of this, and had been trying to deport him, but Algeria refused to take him 10 times.
But that’s not all. In Paris, a 19-year-old student was murdered in the Bois de Boulogne. The suspect is a Moroccan with a prior rape conviction who was under a deportation order. In Lyon last year, an Algerian was arrested over allegedly stabbing to death a disabled Iraqi Christian for posting criticism of Islamists online. In Paris this year, Brahim Bahrir attacked gendarmes with a knife during a ceremony, and was shot dead. He was a French national who had been released in December after serving a Belgian terrorism sentence. In Sarcelles in July, a car carrying weapons was found near a synagogue. The anti-terrorism prosecutor linked the plot to Islamist extremism. Recently, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 46 terrorist attacks have been foiled in France over just four years, most of them Islamist.
And then there are the riots. When Morocco had its World Cup run in 2022, celebrations turned violent in Paris, Lyon, and Montpellier, where a 14-year-old boy was killed by a driver. Last year, PSG’s Champions League celebrations turned into rioting that left two people dead and nearly 200 injured. This year, the same celebrations ended in riots again, with one death and 890 arrests. Also now, every New Year’s Eve, close to 1,000 cars are burned across France. And when police shot Nahel Merzouk, a French 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, France saw the Nahel riots. Rioters burned more than 5,000 vehicles, damaged nearly 1,000 buildings, and attacked some 250 police stations and gendarmeries, along with town halls and even schools. The rioters were mostly young people from the banlieues, many of immigrant background, and the average age of those arrested was 17. The government said about 90% were French citizens, but that’s misleading because citizenship says little about whether they come from immigrant backgrounds.
One problem is that it’s hard to get a full sense of how bad the problem even is, because France does not collect data on race, ethnicity, or religion, including for criminal offenders. That ban dates to a 1978 data protection law, and in 2007, the Constitutional Council struck down a measure that would have allowed ethnic statistics. Part of the logic here is to prevent another rounding up of people on the basis of such factors, as happened during World War II. It’s ironic then that a law passed to prevent another horror like the one that was visited upon Jews is now allowing a new horror to be visited upon Jews, as well as everyone else. And EU law adds another layer: Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which the European Commission proposed in 2012 under Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, restricts processing data on race, ethnicity, or religion. But the GDPR doesn’t mandate this blindness. Denmark, which is bound by the same regulation, publishes crime data by country of origin, including for the children of immigrants. France does publish the nationality of suspects, however, and while foreigners only make up about 9% of residents, they are heavily overrepresented in some offenses, such as vehicle thefts and burglaries. But since most children of immigrants are French citizens, those numbers say nothing about the second generation.
We can try to get at an answer obliquely, but not with any real precision. In 2016, France had about 5.7 million Muslims, more than any other European nation. From 2016 to 2023, about 2.4 million immigrants entered France, and 44% aged 18–59 were Muslim, which suggests roughly 1 million Muslim arrivals. Another 313,000 immigrants arrived in 2024, and France issued about 377,000 first-residence permits in 2025. At the same 44% rate, that adds roughly 300,000 more. These are gross arrivals, ignoring departures, deaths, and births. Still, they put France’s Muslim population at around 7 million. How many of that 7 million is a concern? Well, a 2024 survey found that 22% of French Muslims expressed sympathy for Hamas, and nearly a quarter supported violence against Jews. That pencils out to more than 1 million Muslims living in France with violently hateful ideas about French Jews.
Worse, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, who has studied Islam in French prisons since the early 2000s, has estimated that Muslims make up roughly 40 to 60% of inmates, and up to 70% in some prisons near large cities. France now holds a record 90,000 prisoners, so even the low end of his range would mean about 36,000 Muslim inmates, and the high end would mean about 54,000. That’s a fucking nightmare.
France is being eaten alive and the costs are piling up in burned schools and murdered children. The Simpsons once mocked the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” for giving Paris to the Nazis. What fewer people know is that the craven Vichy regime betrayed its own Jews and deported 76,000 to Auschwitz. Only 3,000 came back. Now they’re holding the door open for another violently antisemitic group. If the first French colonial empire was in the Americas and India, and the second French colonial empire was mostly in Africa, the third is in France itself, as the government colonizes its own population.
But I only have so much sympathy for the French. After all, this is the way the Western Roman Empire collapsed, by reaping the harvest of its conquests, bringing too many other barbaric groups into its fold, and becoming a balkanized clump of states. And frankly, it may sound cold-hearted but what France is experiencing now is partly its own damn fault. If you don’t know the lore of Algerian hatred for the French, let me tell you the story. During the Revolutionary Wars, two Jewish merchants in Algiers, Bacri and Busnach, supplied grain to France on credit, in a deal financed by the city’s ruler. Almost 30 years later, the French had still not repaid their debt and the ruler of Algiers, Hussein Dey, finally lost his temper with French bullshit and, during a heated exchange, slapped French consul Pierre Deval in the face with a fly-whisk. Considering their mistake, the French might have overlooked this insult. But King Charles X, facing a defiant parliament, saw a foreign war as a way to distract from his troubles at home. In 1830, he used the insult as a pretext to invade Algeria.
The conquest was savage. Under Marshal Bugeaud, the army burned villages and crops. In 1845, French forces asphyxiated hundreds of people sheltering in the Dahra caves. War, famine, and disease killed up to a third of the native population. In 1945, after police fired on Algerian demonstrators in Sétif, Algerians fought back, killing around 100 settlers. The French responded with the Sétif massacre, slaughtering thousands of people, many of them innocent, including little children. Both sides committed atrocities in the brutal war that eventually resulted in Algerian independence. But French depravity wasn’t done yet. Algerian harkis, Muslims who fought on the French side, were abandoned after the war, and many were massacred. The few who made it to France were subjected to harsh racism and warehoused in camps, where dozens of children died, and the children of those who survived all this were treated like shit despite the fact that these people had given everything to the country and were, in the greater sense, more truly French than the racist white French born on that land.
France is more than just a people in a place. France is an idea, and it has a soul.
Let me explain what I mean by “the greater sense.” In Les Regrets IX (1558), Joachim du Bellay gave us one of the earliest formulations of France as a civilizing matrix, writing, “France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois.” France, mother of arts, arms, and laws. In Tableau de la France (1833), Jules Michelet wrote that England is an empire, Germany is a country, but France is a person. The idea being, France is more than just a people in a place. France is an idea, and it has a soul. The same spirit runs through the line, often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson but actually from the playwright Henri de Bornier, that “Every man has two countries, his own and France.”
In other words, France is a choice. Not a bloodline. This idea is echoed again and again. Montaigne wrote that he was French only through Paris, and that he considered all men his compatriots. Sacha Guitry is credited with saying that to be Parisian is not to be born in Paris, but to be reborn there. And Hemingway captured the same notion in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, meaning that Paris is the feast you carry with you for the rest of your life, once you’ve lived there young. As a lover of French culture, I cherish this idea. As Americans, we often like to think that we came up with this. We tell ourselves the pretty little lie that the Old World was nasty and brutish with its traditions of blood and soil, but that we threw off such thinking for more modern, liberal truths. Except we inherited a lot of this from the French, and our Founding Fathers knew it, even if we have neglected to teach it. This is one of the great beauties of France. But the problem is that now France has welcomed nations into its house who do not share in the idea, who do not want to belong to some intellectual or aesthetic tradition of meaning or taste. I am talking about people who can scarcely be bothered to even consider such things as a moveable feast of devotion to a certain kind of soul. If you tried to explain it to them, they’d probably stab you.
Those successes convinced the French that assimilation works on its own. What they failed to understand was that it only worked because the system was doing the integrating, and North African workers were arriving just as deindustrialization began taking those very institutions apart.
After the initial horrors visited upon Algerians by the French, things did not improve by much. In World War I, France brought in at least 130,000 North African workers and more than 170,000 Algerian soldiers. Most went home afterward, but small Algerian worker communities stayed on in Paris, Marseille, and the northern industrial areas. Then in 1947, after Algerian Muslims had been made French citizens, a new statute let them move freely to mainland France. In 1963, labor agreements with Morocco and Tunisia brought more and more arrivals. In 1976, the family-reunification decree let workers already in France bring their spouses and children. That, more than anything, is what turned a population of temporary workers into a permanent Muslim community, and their children, born in France, cemented that presence. At the same time, the institutions that used to integrate people were disappearing. Factories, unions, the Communist Party’s suburban networks, and military conscription — suspended in 1997 — had all once turned Italian, Polish, and Portuguese workers into Frenchmen. Those successes convinced the French that assimilation works on its own. What they failed to understand was that it only worked because the system was doing the integrating, and North African workers were arriving just as deindustrialization began taking those very institutions apart.
At the same time, these tensions were made worse by the fact that Muslim immigrants still faced discrimination. In Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016), authors Adida, Laitin, and Valfort show that Senegalese applicants with Muslim names got far fewer callbacks than otherwise identical Christian Senegalese applicants. Partly as a result, unemployment in France’s priority neighborhoods, where many Muslim families live, is more than double the national average. Then there are the anti-French attitudes in post-colonial societies, especially Algeria. The 1954–62 war left a burning hate on both sides, and many descendants of Algerian parents define themselves against France, and the Algerian state’s “memory politics” feed the vicious cycle. Islamist currents don’t help either. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s spilled into France when the Armed Islamic Group carried out a wave of bombings in 1995, including one at Paris’s Saint-Michel station that killed eight people. Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood networks, and imams paid by foreign governments, now spread their influence. In fact, France only stopped accepting new foreign-paid imams in 2024. And while all this was happening, the state blinded itself with colorblind universalism and the ban on ethnic statistics. Meanwhile, “decolonial” ideas are spreading on the left alongside anti-French ones, French leftists treat assimilation as a dirty word, and when cities burn, you get called racist if you point any of this out.
And who loses in all this? The old French, for one. But also the new French, by which I mean Algerians and other Africans and Muslims, who have made their home in this great country and embraced the idea of France, often even more than the native people themselves, as tends to happen. I would argue that we see a similar thing in America with Latino and Indian immigrants. Yet these people are judged as part of the same group as the savages currently tearing things apart. If you talk to an Algerian Muslim who is truly French in spirit, they will speak with utter disdain and even disgust about these newcomers, and they loathe being lumped in with them, rightfully so, though by now many have become quite assimilated to the stupidity of white French racism and the way it recoils from nuance or logic. I feel for these people, trapped now between the idiots on the French left, unassimilated immigrants who tear things apart every time they lose their temper, and the racists on the French right.
The country has simply become too diverse too fast, and the thread of a once beautiful idea is unraveling in the lap of so many different competing ones. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to even have a country when it is being pulled in so many directions. Or as Charles de Gaulle put it, “How can you govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”
Assimilation is the key. People from different societies act differently. Idiotic migration policies and the ignorant expectation that they are "just like us". If they were just like us their countries would be just like West.
Thanks for this excellent summary of the present crisis and historic analysis. The list of examples of crime and violence brought by immigration is simply terrifying.
The French indeed did it to themselves. The question is -- can France be saved? The only way out of it, it seems, would be to stop the immigration from Muslim countries, review the current immigrants and recently naturalized citizens and deport/denaturalize anyone who has any record of criminal or antisocial behavior. Leave only those who have shown good progress towards assimilation. It's a lot of work -- but you cannot leave these people in the country. And of course the laws must be strictly enforced. Why did not police shot at these raging violent lunatics and instead allowed them to run wild for days?