There is some kind of monumental historical revisionist campaign going on in real time now, where the protests in France are described as "un-French" and blamed on Muslim immigration. That kind of disinformation campaign and lies are always disgusting, but now it is some kind of record not only in disgustingness but also in ludicrousness. With one hundred percent predictability - and tradition - everything that is vandalism and stone-throwing is magnified, while the issues of conflict are obscured in absurdum in order to undermine the political legitimacy of the protests.
One could also add that Islamophobia is often described as today's anti-Semitism, and there is some awkwardness with such comparisons, but rarely is it as accurate as now: the heirs of the nationalist right that blamed protests and social unrest on Jews are exactly the same ones who today blame them on Muslims.
Just a little background on France: France is the country in Western Europe where class contradictions and political friction have most repeatedly reached a total discharge. After the overthrow of the monarchy, which began with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, continued with the proclamation of the republic in 1792 and ended with Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état in November 1799 (Brumaire), France has proclaimed four more republics because the previous constitutions and forms of government did not satisfactorily resolve the enormous contradictions.
The Haitian Revolution, the world's first successful anti-colonial slave uprising, was inspired by taking the French Revolution's motto of liberty, equality, and fraternity seriously, and the revolutionaries modelled themselves largely on the radical wing of the French National Assembly, the Jacobins.
France had revolutions in 1830 and 1848. The inhabitants of Paris, at least the radical middle and working classes, responded to the government's capitulation to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 by seizing power over the city and introducing a radical form of direct democracy ("the Paris Commune") that formed a model for most of the communist, socialist and anarchist movements in the world.
After the Paris Commune was crushed - drenched in blood, between 6,000 and 20,000 Communards were executed - France fell into a kind of artificial calm, which ended after only a few years. The nationalist right was devastated by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (German Elsaß–Lothringen) to Germany.
The Third Republic was new-born, and the right was divided between a minority of monarchists (Orléanists who, duh, wanted to restore the monarchy as a constitutional one around the House of Orléans) and a republican majority. At first, the monarchists had a crushing superiority in the waves of the Paris Commune's crushing, but a few years later the republicans won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies - all the while the president of the republic, de Mac Mahon, was an Orléanist.
The political order oscillated between paralysis and radical transformation, and with it came the near end of a political civil war within the French right.
A decade later, General Ernest Boulanger won elections promising revenge against Germany, with support from monarchists, working-class areas, and rural Catholics alike, and he overinterpreted the support as an opportunity for him to establish himself as a dictator. Which went to hell, his near-coup was stopped. He was driven into exile in London and then Brussels, accused of treason for trying to undermine parliamentary democracy.
All of France stood and wavered over and over again during these years during the middle of what has somewhat euphemistically gone down in history as "la belle époque." They may have reigned peace in Europe, but France, the country that was Europe's most powerful for half a millennium, was enormously divided.
The country suffered from enormous scandals and they were handled with enormous repression: in 1892, a deal exploded that would make the soup around the New Karolinska Hospital appear like someone was trying to build a doghouse, and big financiers squandered billions on the project to build a Panama Canal that was only washed away. Freedom of the press was severely restricted in 1893-1894 under the pretext of stopping anarchist propaganda.
The 1893 elections to the Chamber of Deputies resulted in great Republican gains but a crippled order; Radicals and Socialists won many more seats in an election dominated by social issues but the result was a centrist government that was unable to gain a majority for much policy at all. This was followed by four more governments in three years.
It was in this sickly weak climate - certainly with attempts at colonial expansion partly as compensation for the loss of territory to Germany, as well as an alliance with Russia to encircle Germany and break international isolation - that the Dreyfus Affair detonated.
There was a spirit of paranoia and suspicion that permeated much of public and political life in France, and those who opposed prestige projects and adventures were singled out as backward and traitors. Anti-Semitic rhetoric was growing among monarchists and right-wing Catholics. The Revolution and the Republic had given Jews equality before the law and pushed for secularization. Internal enemies were needed to create fear of opposing nationalist policies, and Jews were the obvious Others in France who could be singled out.
The Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus who became the person who would be made an example of. He was sentenced in 1894 to life in prison on the Devil's Island penal colony in French Guiana for espionage and collaboration with Germany. He was innocent and already in 1895-1897 the truth began to trickle out, he had been convicted of espionage carried out by Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
The Dreyfus affair lingered for an enormously long time and the French public was divided into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. It is Europe's most famous case of the combination of judicial corruption, judicial murder and anti-Semitism and largely grouped the left-centre in one camp and the right in the latter. So when social tensions and explosions are to be blamed on internal enemies (who are pointed out as non-French) it is a tradition old enough to go back at least to the Third Republic.
The French national anthem, La Marseillaise, had long been the "national anthem" of radical labour movements around the world. When the French elected a Popular Front government in May 1936, a coalition of socialists, communists, and radical bourgeois parties similar to that elected in Spain, the conservative right began to mobilize not only against it, but to try to roll back most of the social gains from 1789 onwards.
It exploded in 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded France, the largest trade union organization demanded to be armed to defend the country while the reactionary right saw that it would be a repeat of the Paris Commune where the working class would take over the government and therefore welcomed collaboration with the occupying Nazi forces. In southern France (Vichy) they implemented exactly the program they had longed for, where women's place remained in the home, workers would swear obedience to paternalistic bosses and surveillance was constant.
In Vichy, the revolutionary motto of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was replaced by "work, family, fatherland" and, as young children can understand, the tribute to work was not a tribute to the organization of workers but to their happy subordination.
The reactionary right was completely discredited by its collaboration with Nazism, the worst collaborators were executed after the war, and the very definition of treason had to be changed because Marshal Philippe Petain, who led Vichy, was technically the head of state and had betrayed the country, but treason had previously been defined as betraying the head of state rather than the country. (This, incidentally, gave birth to the Fourth French Republic, and in response to misogyny, women were belatedly granted the right to vote in 1944.) Petain collaborated fully, unsurprisingly for a Nazi collaborator, in the Nazi genocide of France's Jews.
The resistance to the Nazi occupation was led by communists, Gaullists (especially the republican bourgeois who supported the Free French forces) and socialists. The reactionary and fascist-loving right was completely discredited for decades. It has taken half a century for it to build its credibility but before its parliamentary mass breakthrough with the successes of the Front National it received an enormous boost from how it positioned itself towards Algeria.
France went through a violent political crisis and failed coup d'état attempt as a large part of the military wanted to take over the government to definitively stop the Algerian independence struggle and put an end to what was seen as its coddling. This led to the fall of the Fourth Republic and the re-election of Charles De Gaulle as first Prime Minister (he had been the de facto leader of the country from 1944 to 1946) and then President of the Fifth Republic.
During May 1968, which in popular historiography has been described as huge student protests, the most extensive general strike in world history up to that time took place. The general strike was, in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition that had previously been extremely strong in France, the way in which the revolution would be carried out and a socialist transformation of society would be initiated. An estimated 10 million workers, or two-thirds of France's workforce, stopped work in May 1968. Football players went on strike and matches were cancelled while players joined strike committees. Prostitutes went on strike and revolted against pimps and brothel owners. Television technicians went on strike and began covering protests in ways that displeased the state television company.
De Gaulle himself thought it was over and fled to the NATO base in Baden-Baden. The magazine Charlie Hebdo, which heads of government and state pretended to worship after the terrorist attack on January 7, 2025, was formed from the ashes of the magazine Hara-Kiri, which was banned after it mocked De Gaulle after his death, but the wave it surfed was the radicalism of the protests of 1968.
The protests today are among the most French, traditional and popular things to happen in France. Those who describe it as un-French are simply monumentally ignorant of French history.
Bubblers: farmers' fertilizer protests, anti-fascism in Paris in the 1980s and 90s, national student protests in the 1980s and 90s.
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