Norma Rigg 🇪🇺 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇬🇧

Nobody sane wants to copy the US.

🚨 The Burning Question: Who Is Rewriting France’s School Protests? France’s school protests began over missing teachers and crowded classrooms. Within days, far-right accounts had recast them as a migrant uprising, and Reform UK had turned them into an election advert. If your timeline has been anything like mine this week, you’ll have seen France on fire. Burning bins, masked teenagers, a firefighter wreathed in flames. The captions do the interpretive work: “second and third-generation migrants”, “migrant students”, and in the replies, worse. One small account, asked whether the protesters were simply students, answered that they were “overwhelmingly just the subhumans”, naming North Africans and Black people. Another popular post claimed that “normie relatives who watch the mainstream news” had “absolutely no idea” what was happening. In fact, the story has been covered by AFP, Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, France 24 and Fox News. What the mainstream coverage lacks is the explanation those accounts want to supply. The unrest is real, and some of it is serious and frightening. But the version circulating on British social media, especially on @elonmusk’s @X, and now in British political messaging, bears little relation to what is actually happening. Britain should recognise the pattern, because it has lived through its own version. In the summer of 2024, after false claims spread online that the #Southport attacker was a ‘Muslim asylum seeker’, rioters attacked a mosque and hotels housing asylum seekers in towns across England. That disorder was driven largely by the far right. This is worth keeping in mind when Reform figures now hold up France as a warning about the Left. What’s actually happening The movement began on 21 September in the Créteil education district, south-east of Paris, according to Reuters. The trigger was a familiar one: schools unable to replace absent teachers. The grievances quickly widened to timetables, class sizes, teacher shortages and classrooms that overheated during this year’s heatwaves. The government itself has called some of these demands legitimate. Blockades spread from the Paris suburbs to Lille, Nantes, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Rennes, Strasbourg and Orléans. By Thursday 1 October the interior ministry counted 1,027 lycées affected, 222 blockaded and 305 police and gendarmes injured. University campuses began to join. That Thursday was the turning point. A lycée in Nantes was set alight. In Marseille, the regional council first said the leadership team of the Lycée Victor-Hugo had been attacked and doused with petrol; the police prefecture and education authority later said staff had been splashed by people pouring petrol into bins and had not been directly targeted. The education minister, Édouard Geffray, said 65 staff had been injured, 40 of them headteachers. Police opened an investigation after a policewoman was filmed being chased and beaten in Paris. More than 400 schools closed on Friday. None of this should be minimised. The interior ministry reported 1,949 arrests on Thursday alone, after more than 600 on Wednesday. But the profile of those detained is telling. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, said about 2,000 people had been held in custody since the movement began, around 90 per cent of them minors. This is, overwhelmingly, a story about teenagers in French schools. How the story was rewritten The most influential relabelling has come from Visegrád 24, an account with a large international following. On Friday morning it posted a photograph of a firefighter engulfed in flames with the caption: “Young second and third-generation migrants film a French firefighter after setting him on fire.” One version has now been viewed more than a million times. The incident is real, but it happened on Tuesday 29 September, at a barricade outside the Lycée Montaigne on Bordeaux’s main shopping street. According to the Gironde prefecture and local reporting, the firefighter was approaching a small fire when it flared and engulfed him. Police told the local broadcaster ICI that an aerosol can had most likely exploded, and ruled out any assault. He suffered burns to his legs, was signed off for several days and returned to his station that afternoon. Prosecutors are investigating the barricade fire as deliberate arson, which is serious enough. The claim that anyone set him alight is false, and nothing in the reporting identifies the background of anyone present. The timing matters. Local papers had explained the incident on the afternoon of 29 September. Visegrád attached its caption three days later, posted it twice and drawing hundreds of thousands of views, and it had not amended it when challenged. The pattern repeats. Another Visegrád post claimed riot police were “holed up” at the Jacques Monod lycée near Orléans under attack from “stone-throwing migrant students”. The blockade there was real: it was one of about a dozen in the Loiret on 1 October, with mortars fired, tear gas used and injuries on both sides. Nothing in the five-second clip, or in any reporting I can find, supports the word “migrant”. The framing then travels. A US site, Legal Insurrection, published a report whose web address describes “second and third generation migrant students”, while its body leans largely on Visegrád’s own posts. It does also quote France 24, but nothing it cites from any French official, prosecutor or school supports the migrant label. Why the migrant label doesn’t hold Start with the data, or rather its absence. France largely bars the collection of data on racial or ethnic origin, under its 1978 data-protection law and a 2007 Constitutional Council ruling, and the official figures released this week cover age, offence and injuries. They say nothing about ethnicity, religion or migration status. Anyone claiming the rioters are “overwhelmingly” North African is not reporting a finding, because no such finding exists to report. Then look at what the protesters are asking for. The core demands reported throughout concern the state of French schools: unreplaced teachers, crowded classes, crumbling buildings, punishing timetables. There are no religious demands. Some protesters have reportedly chanted about Palestine, a political slogan common across young French protest movements, and others have chanted against the National Rally. At one blockade in Carpentras, a video shows a young man chanting antisemitic slogans while another waves a Palestinian flag, and a local elected official has said he will refer it to prosecutors. It is ugly, and it is one incident at one school, with no sign that it reflects the movement’s demands or amounts to an Islamic mobilisation. Look too at where it has happened. It began in the Paris suburbs, but the same blockades, demands and tactics appeared within days in Nantes, Lille, Lyon, Rennes, Strasbourg, and outside a city-centre lycée on Bordeaux’s main shopping street. That spread is hard to square with a story about one community. Finally, the images. Barricades, burning bins and masked teenagers have been the standard repertoire of French school protest for decades. The Jacques Monod lycée that Visegrád presented as a migrant battleground was blockaded in December 2018 too, during protests against reforms to the lycée and the bac and the Parcoursup admissions system. A 16-year-old pupil there was seriously injured in the head by a police projectile, and the Orléans prosecutor referred the case to the police inspectorate. A photograph cannot tell you anyone’s ancestry, and the accounts captioning these pictures are inferring it from faces. Even where many protesters in a suburban school do come from immigrant families, they are still teenagers in French schools, protesting about those schools. Treating their heritage as the cause of the unrest confuses who is there with why they are there. The far-left explanation is contested In France itself, the political argument is about the far left. After a crisis meeting on Thursday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s office said the intelligence services attributed “the origin of the movement” to La France insoumise (LFI) and “its ultra-left proxies”. The Republicans’ presidential candidate, Bruno Retailleau, has since raised whether LFI should be banned. LFI has certainly cheered the protests on. On 28 September Jean-Luc Mélenchon accused the government of ordering repression with “an obvious racist undertone”, told LFI officials and activists to put themselves between police and pupils wherever they could, and wrote “Hands off our youth”. Lecornu replied that the racism charge was an insult that racialised a debate about pupils’ safety. Mélenchon denies encouraging disorder, and his colleague Manuel Bompard has dismissed the government’s claim as conspiracy theorising, insisting the anger is spontaneous. There are good reasons to treat the government’s version with caution. The intelligence assessment has not been published. The documented origin is a mundane one: schools in Créteil unable to replace absent teachers. The education minister’s own emphasis is different again: Geffray has blamed the violence mainly on “individuals from outside” the schools. And the claim comes from a government seven months from a presidential election, with an obvious incentive to tie its fiercest opponents to scenes of burning schools. None of this rules out organised far-left involvement. Militant groups joining and escalating student protests is a familiar pattern in France. But the publicly available evidence supports a narrower conclusion: a real grievance about schools, which LFI rushed to champion and which turned violent in places. That is a long way from a movement manufactured by one party. Importing the unrest: Reform and GB News GB News’s main report on Thursday night ran under the headline “France burns as youth mobs ‘lynch’ police, destroy schools and torch fire engines - with mass migration blamed”. Read the article and the blame turns out to come from one source: Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, the rebranded party long led by Marine Le Pen, who said the attack on the Paris policewoman showed “what France has become after decades of laxity and mass immigration.” The passive “mass migration blamed” never says by whom and so turns one far-right politician’s opinion into the story’s conclusion. The article’s web address and page title still read “mass immigration”. The same article concedes the students are “said to be protesting” about class sizes, workloads and teacher shortages, then tells readers the footage “lays bare the reality”. It reports the attackers shouting “Wallah”, a word widely used in French youth slang, without explanation, inviting readers to draw a conclusion the article never states. It captions the teenagers “feral youths” and carries a clip of presenter Ben Leo calling the scenes “A WARNING for Britain!” GB News’s other reports on the unrest lead with the far left and the students’ grievances, which makes the choice of headline on this one more telling. Even there, one caption reduces the protests to complaints about “excessive homework and too many stairs at school”. Reform’s leading figures took a different route to the same destination. While neither Nigel Farage nor Zia Yusuf explicitly mentions migration, Farage told his followers he was “horrified”, that schools had been burned with “teachers left beaten and doused with petrol”, and that “this will never happen in Britain under Reform”. The post had more than 800,000 views by Friday morning. A separate GB News article headlined him as “horrified by hard-left violence”, in quotation marks; that phrase does not appear in his post, which says he was horrified “by the violence” and blames “hard-left politicians” in a separate sentence. “Doused” follows the first official account from Marseille, and some wire reports used it, though the prefecture and education authority later described staff being splashed rather than targeted. What the post leaves out is why the pupils were protesting at all. “This will never happen in Britain under Reform” also sits oddly with Farage’s own record. The day after the #Southport murders, with false claims about the attacker already circulating, he posted a video wondering “whether the truth is being withheld from us”. The former head of counter-terrorism policing Neil Basu said it gave rioters “a false basis for the attacks on the police”, and critics took to calling the disorder that followed “the #FarageRiots”. Farage condemned the violence and has rejected responsibility, arguing the riots were worse because the public was not told the truth. The attacker, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Wales to Rwandan parents and was not the Muslim asylum seeker of the false claims. The murders were not classed as terrorism, because no ideological motive was established.The murders were not classed as terrorism, because no ideological motive was established. Yusuf’s longer tweet goes further. It cites Wednesday’s figure of more than 600 arrests, which the ministry’s Thursday tally soon dwarfed, describes aerosol cans “piled up and detonated” in Bordeaux (the reporting describes a can exploding in a bin fire), and quotes Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, declaring that “violence can be legitimate”. Bagayoko did say this outside a Saint-Denis lycée on 29 September, speaking about police interventions and adding that it was better avoided, and the Paris police prefect has referred his remarks to prosecutors. He stood by the remark on franceinfo on 1 October, while denying any incitement and calling for de-escalation. It was a reckless thing for a mayor to say, and Yusuf is entitled to criticise it, though he omits the qualification. Then his post turns to Britain. It moves from the Holborn by-election to the #BlackLivesMatter protests and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue and asserts that the British far left “(allegedly) murdered a beloved right-wing politician”. That appears to refer to Ann Widdecombe, a Reform spokeswoman. A man has been charged with her murder and awaits trial, and counter-terrorism police say the motive remains under investigation. The post ends: “Britain needs Reform.” Farage’s and Yusuf’s posts don’t claim the French protesters are migrants. Their move is different: a French school-conditions protest, already blamed by Paris on LFI, becomes a preview of Britain’s future, and Reform becomes the only thing standing in its way. The students’ actual complaints, about teachers and classrooms, disappear entirely. The ethnic caption and the election advert are separate claims, and the second does not depend on the first. It needs only the pictures, and an audience that has already been told what they mean. Why this matters here in Britain There are two distortions at work, and they reinforce each other. Far-right accounts supply the ethnic story: burning schools as proof that immigration has failed. British politicians and broadcasters supply the domestic one: France as a warning, Reform as the remedy. Between them, a protest about absent teachers and overheated classrooms is turned into raw material for someone else’s campaign. Britain knows where the first distortion leads. Southport showed how quickly a false claim about an attacker’s identity can become an attack on a mosque, and pinning violence on migrants without evidence produced the worst disorder in this country in more than a decade. To be clear, nothing suggests this week’s posts have caused any disorder in Britain. The parallel lies in the technique: attributing violence to migrants without evidence, as happened after Southport. France has real problems with its schools, and some of what happened this week was criminal and deserves prosecution. Those who want to understand it should start with what the teenagers say they are angry about. Those who prefer to look at the pictures and supply their own caption are telling us more about themselves than about France.