Student riots engulf France as far-right presidential frontrunner Le Pen vows fiscal turnaround
CNBC furnishes this photograph sending the message that it is ethnic French confronting the police, not African Muslims:
They're not showing you the truth.
October 3, 2026:
Riots spread from Paris’s immigrant suburbs across France
France struggled to contain riots that grew out of school protests in Paris suburbs with large immigrant populations, with schools set ablaze, police attacked and around 5,000 people arrested.
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. ...
And today:
... For the right, the images of crowds dominated by immigrant-descended young people burning down ornaments of the French republic without fear of the forces of order feels like an early Christmas gift. ... it is easy for voters to see crowds with few white faces in the news and interpret this as representative across urban France. Without data easily available, the truth can be whatever you want it to be.
... The protests which began in lycée Saint-Exupéry in the Créteil banlieue of Paris before steadily spreading across France, caught the government by surprise in their scale and intensity. They have also shocked the French public by the high representation of second and third generation immigrants in the protests, and by the direct participation of elected officials from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard left La France Insoumise (LFI) party in the riots.
... The most shocking thing for the general public is not just the violence and the damage itself, but the openness with which Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party has aligned itself with the aims and the means of the protests.
From the very beginning of the protests, LFI politicians have been present at the school gates — something that would be seen as shocking particularly to a British audience. ...
