France is having a student protest, and we all know how those go. Students march, wave signs, demand better schools, gripe about tuition, and every so often burn down a 143-year-old city hall. Wait, what?

Oh, and they’re also looting stores, smashing windows, torching cars and going after police officers, generally treating whole French cities as if somebody had just announced the Purge.

But don’t worry, folks, it’s a student protest, so there’s nothing to see here.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across France on October 17, and plenty of them had real reasons to be there, whether that was crumbling schools, university admissions, the rising cost of living or government policies they don’t like. Fair enough. Protest is a legitimate part of living in a free society. What went completely off the fucking rails was everything else that happened that day.

In Paris, masked groups ransacked luxury boutiques, supermarkets and other businesses. Rioters in Marseille forced their way into city hall and trashed the place, a tourist office in Lyon caught fire, and in Limoges they set the historic city hall alight and destroyed much of a building that had stood since 1883, because apparently nothing says “we need better educational opportunities” like burning down the place where your grandparents got married. Then there’s the looting. I’d genuinely love for someone to walk me through what stealing designer clothes has to do with university admissions, or explain why I’m supposed to believe the guy kicking his way into a luxury boutique lies awake at night over France’s student-to-teacher ratio. “Education is a fundamental human right! Now grab that handbag!” Give me a fucking break.

There’s a difference between protest and destruction

I’ll say this up front, before anybody’s ideological panties get twisted, because it matters: most of the people at these demonstrations were peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of them marched without burning a single thing. That makes the violence look worse, not better, since the criminals took grievances that belonged to other people and used them as cover to wreck stuff. And yet every time this happens we somehow land in another endless conversation about understanding the frustrations of the people who did it. I’m perfectly happy to understand frustration, though arson I’m a lot less keen to understand, and call me radical, but you can be furious with your government without setting fire to your neighbor’s livelihood.

The shopkeeper whose business got gutted didn’t write France’s education policy. Neither did the guy whose car got torched have any hand in designing the admissions system, and last I checked, the firefighters risking their lives to save a historic city hall weren’t the reason groceries cost more either. So why the hell are they the ones paying for it?

The ideological blind spot

What really gets under my skin is how ready certain political commentators are to explain violence away, so long as the people doing it are supposedly fighting for an approved cause.

We saw versions of this in America during the 2020 riots, and we’re watching it again in France. Somebody smashes up private property and it gets written up as an expression of legitimate frustration; somebody loots a store and we’re told it’s a symptom of inequality; and attacking police has apparently been promoted to resistance. I think that’s bullshit. A crime doesn’t become a political statement because the person committing it has a grievance, and you can make that grievance as legitimate as you like without it magically converting criminal behavior into legitimate protest.

We should also be careful about claiming to know who’s behind every mask. French authorities have pointed toward violent far-left groups, and reporting has documented opportunistic looters as well, which is evidence worth talking about.

The real problem is that some people are so set on defending the politics around a protest that they can no longer tell the peaceful participants from the criminals exploiting them. It’s almost as though their vision has been completely occluded by rectal tissue (for those unfamiliar with the medical terminology, their heads are so far up their asses they’ve mistaken their colon for a window).

Stop calling everything a protest

Nobody’s disputing that France has real problems, that its students have real complaints, or that its citizens have legitimate reasons to be furious with their government. But once masked gangs are burning public buildings, attacking people and looting businesses, we’ve stopped talking about citizens exercising their right to peaceful assembly and started talking about riots, and slapping a more socially acceptable name on them doesn’t change what happened. You don’t have to pick between supporting students and condemning criminals. It’s entirely consistent to demand better schools and also demand that arsonists go to prison. I’d actually go further and say that protecting peaceful protesters from violent opportunists is one of the most important jobs a government has, because a society that can’t tell dissent from destruction eventually can’t protect either its citizens or their rights.

When your student protest needs riot police, hundreds of firefighters and an army of insurance adjusters to clean up after it, maybe it’s time to stop calling it a student protest. It’s a crime scene.

And if the majority of the bad actors are foreign born, then you might just have an invasion.