France is not burning: how protest and inequality shape its unrest

Violence and public narratives

For weeks, international coverage has focused on fires and damage to shopping streets in France. The unrest accompanies a student movement calling for better education conditions, which the account describes as otherwise peaceful.

Treating property damage, attacks on people, revolt and its repression as equivalent can obscure important differences. The account also identifies inequality, discrimination, social humiliation and precarious life as forms of violence within society.

Revolt across French history

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was an armed uprising against the monarchy, with the prison seen as a symbol of its abuses. About 100 people died when defenders fired on the attackers; after the fortress surrendered, its governor, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de Launay, was killed and his head paraded on a pike.

In 1792, revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace, and hundreds of Swiss Guards died. That September, amid fears of foreign invasion, armed groups executed more than 1,000 prisoners, including Catholic priests and people held for common crimes.

Labour and student mobilisations

Collective violence has also accompanied labour struggles. A textile strike in Armentieres in 1903 led to shop ransacking; in Limoges in 1906, demonstrators entered factories, destroyed porcelain, looted two gun shops and set off an explosive device outside a director’s home.

The 1968 student protest over university conditions widened into a mobilisation involving millions of striking workers. Paris saw barricades, overturned or burning cars, cobblestones and Molotov cocktails, while the director of Sud Aviation was held inside the Nantes factory for several days.

Recent unrest and its context

In 1979, steelworkers protesting major job cuts left damage at the subprefecture of Briey, along with burning vehicles and smashed shop windows. Protests against labour law reforms in 2016 also included attacks on storefronts and police vehicles.