As usual, people are looking for deep reasons, but I think there isn't any for the most part and the real explanation is much more boring. There is a very high level of general dissatisfaction in France at the moment, mostly due to anemic economic growth and inflation, especially with the price of gas. In addition, Macron has been in power for almost 10 years and is very unpopular, which only adds to general dissatisfaction. The high school protests, although they were already fizzling out, have provided motivation for the left by fueling the hope that it could ride out that wave to energize its own protests. So there was a fertile ground for protests, which are pretty common in France after summer. Still, while the protests were large, they were hardly impressive by French standards. What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were. Contrary to popular mythology, French protests are not generally violent. France has a very strong protest and strike culture, but the meme about how we riots all the time is overdone. Traditionally, protests are traditionally organized by unions, which coordinate with the authorities beforehand and have a security service that takes care of troublemakers during the protest. This is why the violence always starts toward the end of the protests, after the official demonstration has disbanded and people begin to scatter, because that's when it's harder for the police to control the situation. Protests have increasingly led to violence in recent years because they have become more spontaneous and are more often organized by people on social media, but also and relatedly because increasingly far-left groups and children of immigrants opportunistically join them to cause mayhem and loot. I keep seeing a lot of people who are depicting those kids as "Islamists" and ideologically motivated actors, but I think it's a complete misreading of the situation in my opinion. This isn't an "Islamist uprising" or whatever nonsense people are talking about. Their actions are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in Black ghettos in the US, where anti-social behavior is totally normalized, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background. This nihilism and their family background makes them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination, which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to religion, but most of them aren't ideologues and those who are don't loot stores. As I explained before, the police often don't intervene because they are overwhelmed and they have instructions from the government not to, because politicians are terrified that if they do a kid will be killed and they will have full-blown race riots on their hands. So what they do instead is contain the violence geographically and arrest the most violent participants later at home, when the risk that the cops will kill one of them is low, using video/photo evidence. Eventually things will fizzle out, in part because the violence will discredit the movement and actually make it easier for the government to deal with it, but this tactic is very costly since we are effectively accepting that every now and then far-left activists and immigrant thugs will just burn and loot while the police watch. The problem from the government's point of view is that, if they use repression by telling the cops to break skulls, they will kill some of the kids and this will result in a massive backlash, leading to more protests and probably even more violence. I think we need to hand out serious prison time to protesters who are caught engaging in violence to deter this kind of shit, but the government has a very limited ability to do so, because justice is independent, courts are full of left-wing judges who refuse to do that, they are already overwhelmed with cases, prisons are full and we are broke. So there isn't one single explanation, it's just a combination of factors, including random stuff that nobody could predict. The context explains why something like that *can* happen, but it doesn't explain why it happens when it does. Again it's probably random for the most part. It would take years to solve the problem even if we started now, which we won't because our politics is completely broken, because it would require getting our budget in order, implementing reasonable economic policies, fixing our immigration and justice system, etc. We are cooked to be honest.