France in flames: student riots and schools set on fire

France burns: student riots and schools set on fire

Why are schools burning in France and the streets spiraling out of control? As of this discussion, the neighboring country is racking up student riots, school buildings in flames and a sense of lawlessness that is already being measured in headlines. The most viral video shows a young man writing a hostile message against the Rassemblement National on a French teenage girl during student protests. On that footage, a narrative of a France falling apart has been built. And the conversation drifted, as it almost always does, toward 2005, the banlieues and a political promise that was never kept.

What is happening in France with the schools?

The starting point is a country with burned schools and riots that no one can quite categorize. The clip circulating most is the one of the young man writing a contemptuous message against the far-right party on a teenage girl. The gesture has become a symbol of a tension that goes beyond the strictly school-related: the street as the stage where identity, class and resentment are fought out, and where the adversary is no longer a government but a diffuse other.

The comparison with Spain comes in two sentences. Some project a scenario of a European war in the short term, and others see an immediate contagion effect in Spanish cities. These are projections with no data to back them up —a current of opinion, not a proven fact— and they say more about the ambient antiestéticar than about the real picture of the riots.

The shadow of 2005: Sarkozy, the banlieues and the Merz mirror

The historical parallel is the most repeated one. One of the readings going around recalls that in 2005 violence in the French banlieues terrorized the country, that Nicolas Sarkozy then promised to expel undocumented migrants and incivil, and that the French voted for him en masse. He made it to the Élysée. And, according to this version, the promise was never carried out. The same pattern is attributed to Friedrich Merz at the head of the German chancellery.

It is a thesis with a catch: it mixes a verifiable fact —the 2005 explosion did happen— with an interpretation of the voter's intent that admits no empirical verification whatsoever. But it works as a framework. It explains why any riot in France is read today as a failure of immigration policy rather than as a problem of housing, youth unemployment or urban segregation, which is where the most technical diagnoses tend to converge.

«The global mafia imports migrants»: the unproven hypothesis

There is a more conspiratorial layer. It claims that current European presidents act as puppets, bribed and blackmailed, and that a supposed global mafia is dedicated to importing migrant population with the connivance of those in power. No evidence backs that construct. It is exactly the kind of explanation that replaces analysis with a villain: comfortable, total and, precisely for that reason, unprovable.

What is striking is how it coexists with far more down-to-earth diagnoses. Urban segregation, youth unemployment in the outlying neighborhoods and the breakdown of social mobility explain a burned school far better than any international conspiracy. But the first version travels faster.

From the fire to the TV remote

The conversation also has its share of domestic drift. Among the messages about France appears the anecdote of the person who smashed the TV against the wall, or the one who threw out their 16-inch set when digital terrestrial television arrived in 2004. After-dinner humor that reveals something: information overload pushes people to switch off. The same society that consumes other people's riots one headline at a time has also learned to turn off the set.

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With this material, the question is not whether France will calm down, but how long it will take for the next neighborhood to catch fire. And since no one brings the number of firefighters, we are left with the one about the broken television.