Tag: france

French PM Puts Telecoms On Alert For Nationwide Social Media Blackout As Far-Left Riots Spiral

Student grievances may have sparked the unrest, but one communist protester explained the turmoil in the streets is part of a broader revolution against “Macron and capitalism.”

Prepare For Nationwide Social Media Blackout

By late Saturday evening, French authorities had detained almost 1,000 people during demonstrations and riots that drew at least 400,000 participants, while far-left uprisings spread across other parts of Europe.

About 110,000 people demonstrated in Paris, according to the Interior Ministry. The government deployed about 70,000 officers across major metro areas.

Michael Shellenberger reports:

France’s Prime Minister asked telecom companies to prepare to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence.”

Separately, far-left unrest emerged in Albania, Spain, and Brussels, as well as in Italy’s cities of Naples, Rome, and Milan.

Footage from across Europe today, as communists stage a broader revolutionary movement:

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Paris Police Chief Sparks Outcry By Advising Shopkeepers To Hire Private Security Ahead Of Saturday’s Far-Left Protests

Shop owners in Paris are bracing for a new weekend of far-left protests against the rising cost of living, after last week’s demonstrations devolved into violence, looting, and arson across France.

In the capital, 451 shops were vandalized on Oct. 17 and 18, including 228 that were looted, according to the City of Paris. The government counts about 3,000 businesses hit nationwide.

On Oct. 22, nearly every store along the Champs-Élysées was barricading its storefront with metal shutters, security grilles, or wooden boards, as bewildered tourists looked on, The Epoch Times observed. Chanel, Lacoste, and Louis Vuitton all had been targeted by looters last week.

Near the Place de la République, workers have been screwing plywood panels over windows and doors, while posters on the boards invite residents to join a neighborhood WhatsApp group against break-ins.

Shops were not the only targets on Oct. 17. In Paris, individuals also forced their way into residential buildings, The Epoch Times witnessed.

Hire Private Security Agents

In a letter sent on Oct. 21 to Paris’s local elected officials, reported by France Info, Police Prefect Patrice Faure urged shop owners near the protest routes to hire private security agents, “possibly with dog-handler teams,” lower their shutters, and consider not opening on Saturday.

The reinforced police deployment cannot on its own guarantee the protection of every establishment, the letter states.

The advice sparked outcry from critics who said protecting citizens is the state’s job, not shopkeepers’.

“The government is asking shopkeepers to pay for private security guards out of their own pockets. This is an admission that it can no longer fulfill its most fundamental duty: protecting the French people,” Sarah Knafo, a member of the European Parliament and one of the leading figures of the conservative Reconquest party, said on X.

“In return,” she said, “can shopkeepers stop paying taxes to the government?”

David Lisnard, the president of New Energy, wrote on X that this is “an unacceptable admission of powerlessness and a complete reversal of fundamental principles.”

“Shopkeepers pay for the repairs, pay taxes so that the state ensures their security, and are now expected to pay a third time for private security,” he said.

Faure later conceded a “clumsiness” in his wording, while stating that protecting shop owners remained the authorities’ responsibility and priority.

Unarmed and Outnumbered

Requests for quotes have doubled since the riots, according to the French Union of Security Professions, the industry federation.

“Calls to our switchboard and email requests have multiplied,” Raphaël Mashhadi, manager of the Paris firm Gardiennage Paris RMS, told The Epoch Times.

Clothing boutiques, grocery stores, and hotels are booking guards in advance “on top of physical protections such as wooden panels,” he said.

A 12-hour night shift costs 420 euros (about $470) before tax, Mashhadi said, against the 10,000 to 20,000 euros he said a smashed storefront window can cost.

“The difference speaks for itself,” he said.

Cyril Baudouin, who runs RPro Sécurité, told The Epoch Times that his activity had risen by 5 percent to 15 percent and that he would turn down requests he could not staff. He called the appeal “a bit unfortunate” for shop owners who already suffered losses and must now pay for their own protection.

“It might have been preferable for the state to pay for the service, or to requisition private security companies, since prefects have the power to do so,” Baudouin said.

Under French law, security guards are normally confined to the premises they are hired to protect, and they can only carry a weapon when lives are considered to be at “exceptional risk,” and even then only with the prefect’s sign-off for each individual assignment.

“We cannot be armed the way police officers and gendarmes are,” Mashhadi said.

Baudouin said a prefectoral order could at least have allowed agents to carry pepper gel on the street during the protest.

“A security agent alone can do nothing. What we saw was not even a crowd; it was a horde of rioters, violent people, and there were many of them,” Baudouin said.

The only option is to evacuate staff, lock up, and call the police, he said, stressing that guards may block a doorway but can’t strike anyone, as a single complaint can cost them their license.

“We are there to prevent, deter, alert, and assist.”

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Now You Say! German Chancellor Admits Immigration and Failed Assimilation Caused French Riots

More than a decade after Berlin opened the gates of Europe to mass migration, a German Chancellor has publicly admitted that importing millions of foreigners and the failure to integrate them is causing carnage in Europe.

On the sidelines of the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin this week, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he is concerned that riots in France and Italy could spill over into other European Union nations.

When pressed in an interview with Bloomberg as to the reasons for the unrest seen in cities like Paris and Milan, which have seen thousands of arrests, widespread looting, and arson attacks, Chancellor Merz admitted that it is “most likely” the result of “non-integrated people” due to “migration”.

He said this was leading citizens to vote in larger numbers for “extremely right and extremely left” political parties, creating “tensions and obviously riots in some countries, including France.”

The admission that mass migration and the failed attempts at assimilation are not only radicalising the host populations, but also responsible for violent civil unrest is quite striking from Merz, who leads the same Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party which sparked the European Migrant Crisis of 2015 under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, resulting in one of the largest demographic shifts in modern history.

While Merz campaigned on clamping down on immigration, he largely abandoned this position after forming a coalition with the left-wing, pro-open-borders Social Democrats (SPD) rather than partnering with the anti-mass-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which he has claimed is outside the bounds of political acceptability.

During his 17-month tenure in office, Merz has frequently defended the need for continued mass migration into Germany and Europe as a whole, claiming that more waves of foreigners are required due to supposed shortages in the labour market and to mitigate the demographic impacts of an ageing population.

“Germany is a country of immigration. It has always been so; it is so now; and it will remain so,” he declared just last May.

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France Slaps 8PM Curfews On Cities As Interior Minister Admits Police ‘Lost Control’; Macron Flees To The Gulf

France moved Monday to put riot-hit cities under curfew after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that authorities had lost control of the streets in several major cities over the weekend. President Emmanuel Macron refused Nuñez’s offer to resign and then left for a Gulf tour to secure fuel supplies.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told prefects to impose “very limited” and “localized” curfews. According to France 24’s live coverage, Lecornu ruled out a full curfew for Paris. He said a state of emergency could be declared “if necessary,” but that curfews seemed better suited, adding: “I am absolutely determined to restore order.” Marseille’s prefect banned protests and gatherings from noon to 8 p.m.

By Monday evening, Lecornu’s office had named the first towns, all in the northern Nord department. Lille, Douai, Wattignies and Denain will be under curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday nights, with each mayor’s agreement, according to Franceinfo. Lille is where Nuñez said rioters broke into city hall, and Wattignies is one of its suburbs. Lille’s Socialist mayor, Arnaud Deslandes, had refused earlier in the day to sign a curfew order, arguing that a late-evening curfew wouldn’t match the hours the trouble broke out. Denain was already under curfew: its mayor ordered a weeklong curfew from 9 p.m. starting Sunday, after what the town said were fires, mortar fireworks and paving stones thrown at police by hooded rioters on Saturday.

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Macron Addresses Nation: Refuses Blame, Ignores Immigration Impact on Riots, ‘How Can French People Do This?’

In an address to the nation on Sunday evening, French President Emmanuel Macron refused to take any accountability for the national riots that erupted on Saturday, as he sought to shift the blame onto the far-left and even external forces like the Iran conflict while failing to acknowledge the role mass migration played in creating a groundswell of support for the unrest.

President Macron, who has become little more than a lame duck in the Élysée with six months left in his term in office, addressed the country for the first time since the youth revolt began nearly a month ago.

Rather than taking a ‘the buck stops here’ approach, Mr Macron did not admit to any personal failings after his government failed to foresee or prevent some of the most destructive riots in recent memory, resulting in historic buildings being torched, thousands of shops being looted, and hundreds of police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters being injured on Saturday.

Instead, the outgoing leader pointed to “extremists from far-left groups” and “criminals” as being solely responsible for the “unrestrained violence” witnessed across France.

Meanwhile, Macron appeared to completely ignore the role that the importation of millions of foreigners into the country has had on the social framework, with many of the rioters being suspected of hailing from the multicultural suburban enclaves like Saint-Denis. Instead, the president questioned, “How can French people do this to France?”

“Why burn down the town hall in Limoges, the tourist office in Lyon, storm the town hall in Marseille, or attack the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux? How can they go so far? Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. We all feel anger and shame tonight. Seeing the streets of our cities so ransacked is unbearable,” he questioned.

The neo-liberal president went on to claim that a distinction should be made between the “several hundred thousand of our fellow citizens [who] demonstrated with the intention of making legitimate demands” and “those who destroyed, vandalised, and looted.”

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Hackers Target French Grocers

Hackers have demonstrated that you do not need to destroy a farm or stop a delivery truck to destroy food. There was recently an overnight attack on supermarket refrigeration systems in France that forced temperatures as high as 50 C or 122 F across 150 stores. Food had to be discarded after six hours in high temperatures. Every aspect of life that operates online is fair game in cyberwarfare.

Updated Reuters reporting says Carrefour identified 80 affected supermarkets, while Monoprix said roughly 5% of its approximately 490 stores were hit. Intermarché’s chief executive estimated nationwide losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day, although a verified industry-wide total was not yet available. Danfoss, the refrigeration supplier, said affected equipment was running outdated firmware and that customers had previously been advised to update supported systems or replace older ones.

We have developed an absurd assumption that connecting something automatically improves it. Remote access is convenient, so we count the convenience as a benefit while treating the ongoing obligation to secure it as overhead. Yet monitoring a refrigerator and allowing someone elsewhere to change its operation are different powers.

This obsession with connecting everything deserves a harder examination. Remote monitoring can save money and identify equipment failures, but remote control also creates something an attacker can exploit. The issue here is network access to essential controls. Once someone unauthorized can change how the machinery operates, a computer intrusion can produce physical destruction.

People still imagine war requires an army crossing a border. Why invade when you can interfere with the systems that keep the population supplied? If an attacker gained access to refrigeration controls shared across a large chain, food could be destroyed in hundreds of locations before the morning shift arrived. For scale, 1,000 stores losing 10 metric tons each would mean 10,000 tons gone. Extend the disruption into refrigerated warehouses and you threaten supplies destined for many more stores. The food has already been produced and paid for. Restoring a computer does not bring it back, and replacement shipments cannot appear simply because a politician promises that everything is under control. The economic consequences would spread through lost sales, interrupted wages, replacement costs, and potentially higher prices, while frightened customers rushed to buy what remained.

Being on the electrical grid is not the same as being accessible over the internet. This attack is disturbing precisely because it did not require a blackout. Dependence on power creates one vulnerability; insecure network controls create another. Add dependence on digital ordering, communications, and deliveries, and a business can discover that several supposedly separate functions rely on the same fragile chain of services. The question should be how much can continue working when one link fails, rather than how many functions can be managed remotely.

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France Street Violence Hits Record Levels Amid Multicultural Youth Revolts

The French Ministry of the Interior states that street violence has reached record levels fuelled in part by the violent student uprisings seen in multicultural hubs across the country in recent weeks.

Following another day of mass mobilisation of students in concert with far-left political parties and radical trade unions apparently intent on sparking more chaos, the Ministry of the Interior released statistics showing an unprecedented level of violence in public spaces.

According to government data, public violence incidents outside the home hit a record high of 20,000 per month in September, or nearly 700 per day, Le Figaro reported.

This represented a seven per cent increase over August, suggesting a significant role for the youth riots that began in the middle of last month and have featured high levels of violent attacks on police, other students, teachers and school administrators, and other innocent bystanders.

Prominent French criminologist Professor Alain Bauer lamented that society is becoming “TikTok-ized”, in which “nothing ever has consequences anymore”, and young people are increasingly becoming “uninhibited, sometimes nihilistic”.

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Violent student protests spread from France to Belgium

Student protests have spread from France to Belgium, with demonstrations over education conditions marred by vandalism, fires, and arrests in the Liege region on Monday.

The unrest follows weeks of violent school protests across France, where students began protesting in mid-September over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, and long school days. Belgian students have raised similar grievances while also opposing local education reforms, higher public transportation costs, and rising tuition fees.

Hundreds gathered outside schools across Liege, blocking entrances and marching through the city. Shops in the center closed as a precaution, while protesters attempted to damage shutters at the Saint-Michel Institute. Firefighters also reported scooter fires in nearby Herstal and Chenee.

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French Feminist Convicted Of The Crime Of “Public Insult” For Refusing To Call Transgender Mayor A “Woman”

Dora Moutot is a feminist who has dedicated much of her life to fighting for women’s rights and has built a following on social media. Like other feminists, Moutot does not view transgender women the same as biological women. She has now joined others who are facing criminal charges for expressing those views. Transgender advocates have demanded that she be punished for her views in France.

Moutot recounted how transgender activists demanded that she be more “inclusive” in how she referred to “women.” She refused, and explained that “being a woman is a biological fact and that I didn’t think saying so should be controversial.” She was immediately denounced as a “transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a term I’d never even heard before.”

What followed was all too familiar. A cancel campaign led to her brand partnerships being canceled. In 2022, she was invited on a French TV program to discuss transgender issues with Marie Cau, France’s first transgender mayor. On the program, she was asked if she thought Cau was a woman. Moutot responded, Cau “is a man, a transfeminine man.”

That was all it took. Transgender advocates had their case and filed charges for “public insult,” which is a crime in France with a maximum punishment of one year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 for insults committed against a person because of their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Free speech has long been in a free fall in France. Many disagree with Moutot and they are accorded free speech to denounce her views. However, Moutot is not extended the same protection based on the content of her views.

These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”

This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”). However, in today’s France, “liberté” is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of “equity” and “fraternity.”

In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss the decline of free speech in France and other nations. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.

As in this case, activists spend more time silencing opposing views than responding to them. For transgender activists, it is intolerable for feminists like Moutot to hold contrary views. Instead of addressing her viewpoints in public, they want her declared a criminal. Censorship then becomes an insatiable appetite for groups to silence their own critics.

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Far-left French mayor says ‘violence can be legitimate’ as schools burn

At Lycée Léonard de Vinci, a high school in Roubaix, the front door burned while teenagers filmed on their phones. In Nantes, the entrance hall of Lycée Nelson-Mandela was gutted. In Lille, masked men in black kicked a chemistry teacher in the back and chased him down the street. In Marseille, Reuters reported, the principal of Victor Hugo high school was doused in petrol.

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, alone, 356 high schools were blockaded. Police made 625 arrests, about two-thirds of them minors. Eighty-three police officers and gendarmes were hurt, along with 119 students and staff. Île-de-France put school damage near €1 million, including more than €100,000 at Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis.

There are real grievances about schools in the region. In the Créteil school district, classes have 32 to 35 students, and teachers go missing. But overcrowded classrooms do not explain masked operators moving from school to school. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described troublemakers travelling between campuses to incite violence. And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party, called the students “harmless.”`

The unmasked face of the week was Bally Bagayoko, 53, mayor of Saint-Denis, elected in March with 50.77 percent for La France Insoumise. He showed up at the gate of the blockaded Lycée Paul-Éluard beside a burning dumpster, laughing and handing out high-fives as teenagers cheered. Since then, he has denied lighting anything and calls the viral framing “fake news.”

What he said on camera the next day is not in dispute, and prosecutors are now investigating it: “Violence can be legitimate, but whenever you can avoid it, that is better.” He called the students children with a right to make mistakes, then told a reporter, “If I slap you, you’re going to react.”

The same day, students surrounded a BFMTV crew, roughed up two journalists and forced the crew out under escort. A girl on camera called BFM a “racist” outlet. The mayor posted three words: “Elle a raison !” She’s right.

Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred Bagayoko to prosecutors under Article 40 for incitement to commit a crime. Emmanuel Macron said no politician may legitimize violence. Nuñez said violence is never legitimate. Valérie Pécresse said she would send Paul-Éluard’s repair bill to the mayor’s city.

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