Descent Into Savagery is Now

France witnessed scenes of urban violence and looting following the Paris Saint-Germain football club’s cup victory on Saturday, leaving one person dead, 219 injured including eight seriously, and resulting in 780 arrests across multiple cities.

According to Causeur, mayhem erupted around Porte Maillot, Porte d’Auteuil, and several Paris neighborhoods even before the match concluded. The disturbances quickly spread to provincial cities, with rioters deploying fireworks mortars, attacking law enforcement, smashing storefronts, and destroying public property.

As PSG players lifted their trophy, cars burned in the streets. Television screens simultaneously broadcast images of sporting triumph alongside scenes of pillaging and destruction. The fatality occurred when a motorcyclist riding on the peripheral highway was caught in the crowd.

President Emmanuel Macron received the victorious players at the Élysée Palace on Sunday, where he merely lamented what he called unacceptable scenes of violence. His remarks offered no assurance that similar riots would not erupt during the World Cup scheduled to begin in ten days, nor that those arrested would face meaningful judicial consequences.

A Pattern, Not an Aberration

As Causeur reports, commentators described the events as spillover, but that characterization minimizes the gravity of what has become a recurring phenomenon. Similar violence now follows football matches, national holidays, New Year celebrations, and virtually any mass gathering occasion.

For decades, left-wing governments joined by segments of the right, along with activist organizations like SOS Racisme, have promoted the notion that simply proclaiming coexistence makes it real. They have ignored a fundamental truth: genuine coexistence cannot be decreed. It results from shared commitment, requiring different individuals to freely accept the same rules, institutions, and boundaries.

A growing segment of the population has long demonstrated its refusal of this requirement. The constant denunciation of alleged French societal racism has paradoxically fueled separation rather than integration. By repeatedly telling certain groups they inhabit a fundamentally hostile country, authorities nurture resentment rather than belonging, manufacturing adversaries where they claim to create citizens.

From Denial to Reality

Elements among descendants of North African immigration, now joined by members of more recent immigrant groups, express rejection through various forms: gratuitous violence, trafficking, assaults, refusal of authority, attacks on state representatives, periodic riots, and occasionally terrorism.

For years these phenomena were minimized as isolated incidents, explained away through poverty, exclusion, or discrimination. Any deeper analysis immediately became suspect. Yet the facts accumulate.

What the violence accompanying public celebrations now reveals extends beyond a security problem. It demonstrates the existence of groups for whom national institutions, symbols, and common goods no longer represent patrimony worth protecting but rather something foreign, sometimes hostile. People do not destroy what they consider their own. They do not vandalize what they belong to.

Manufacturing Internal Enemies

The inevitable question becomes: how does a society produce its own enemies? Contrary to simplistic discourse, Islam alone does not explain this phenomenon. History overflows with violent movements having nothing to do with Muslims: Chinese revolutionaries, Nazis, fascists, communists, Rwandan genocidaires, or Khmer Rouge. Latin America experiences endemic violence. Everywhere the same mechanisms appear: resentment, jealousy, social hatred, domination desires, permanent victimization, and almost always the designation of an enemy supposedly responsible for all misfortunes.

However, in contemporary Europe, Islamism provides these passions with language, justification, and promise. Mass immigration has facilitated the creation of territories where alternative norms, authorities, and sometimes loyalties compete with those of the nation. Drug lords, traffickers, and preachers often wield more influence than state representatives in these zones.

Differences of gender, generation, or skin color are not the problem, Causeur emphasizes. The problem is violence itself.

With information from Causeur