To think the French students are out of control?

What is France to do. Mass migration and a violent far left movement has left them out of options. Borrowing to buy off the left has run out of road. The state is broke and the economy is on the rocks. No jobs for them and the benefits train is out of gas. What a mess!

Over to you Ms Le Pen!

Over to you Ms Le Pen!

She's already done her (concerned, serious face on) address to the nation..some of the TV networks carried it this PM.

We get Melenchon later on at least one of the major rolling news channels...

It's election season........

The President addresses the nation at 2000 tonight.

Yes I saw that on IG. Really sad. The people who did that are responsible for her distress.

Mass migration has made France an amazing country and one that people the world over love to visit. I genuinely don't see what you are seeing with these protests, if anything they are a model example of multiculturalism because I see people of all ethnicities coming together to fight for their right to a decent education.

A lot of the destruction can be attributed to the far right who seem to be capitalising on genuine resentment in order to make the left look bad. That's what I'm hearing from people I know who are French.

France is alarmingly close to crashing the Eurozone. The ECB couldn’t bail them out. But the French wouldn’t accept massive state cuts.

We’d better hope it doesn’t happen because we’d be caught in the hurricane.

Ps ... this isn't about French students moaning about their classrooms. Stop watching the BBC and get your information elsewhere and get a grip on the real situation this is astonishing and embarrassing

The rioters dress differently and arrive separately. It's not that a peaceful protestor suddenly starts looting a shop.

Have the peaceful protesters attempted to stop the rioters? The peaceful ones must realise that the rioting and destruction are not doing their cause any good.

There are other forces at work here who are agitating, creating chaos and mayhem to undermine the French government Right wing commentators and X tweets are pumping out disinformation . With Le Pen waiting in the wings. This has gone way beyond a student protest.

Sorry? You think the right is rioting and stirring up trouble on the streets in France?

Even the Guardian headlines are bad

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/18/french-government-crisis-talks-violent-unrest-policing-macron

In Marseille, where masked groups stormed the city hall and a police station, the Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, told BFMTV: “I have no words … I never thought I’d ever live through something like this. Hordes of rioters and looters attacked our common [state] buildings … with no real demands, but with the sole aim to wreck the demands of those who had demonstrated legitimately.”

The left don't behave like this, please don't buy into Russia's lies.

I saw a news programme in France about Calais. Not the camps, but the social housing blocks. My god, it was horrific. Lawless youths robbing people in broad daylight.

(Half) my family live in Italy and the second-generation immigrants not first generation are presenting a problem, like in Sweden. Disaffected, not interested in education, forming gangs.

All these problems across the western world is the long tail of the 2008 banking crisis, we are all living through a fiscal crisis of the state, they have all spent too much money, since then and covid and are stuck. If you listened to the news recently the IMF stated that government's have to start paying down the debt, but more austerity will cause more problems, more far right, the next decade is going to be very choppy...

I expressed myself badly I think.

I do agree that violence is not the answer but, I also think it is the only thing that gets an answer. States have all the power, but surely rule by consent? When rules, regulations, and tax law favours the few rather than the many, what can be done? There have been peaceful protests for quite some time.

Can the State hit back? Well - it does so the question is moot. Can one complain about the excessive use of power, an imbalanced fight, unfair tactics? Yes. Should the state hit back is a different question and one I do not know how to answer. I am thinking the miners strike for example.

This was posted earlier.