There is a rhythm to public anger that Europe has come to know all too well. It begins with a concrete, human problem—something ordinary people can name and feel. In France, in late September and early October, that problem was the slow strangulation of the public school system: not enough teachers, not enough support staff, buildings that were falling apart, and a daily reality that made it harder and harder for children to learn and for adults to hope. Parents looked at their children’s classrooms and saw overcrowding. Teachers looked at their schedules and saw chaos. Students looked at their futures and saw uncertainty. These were not abstract political complaints. They were the accumulated wounds of years of neglect, and they were felt most painfully in the neighborhoods where life is already hardest—places where social hardship is concentrated, where public services are thin, and where families often depend on schools not just for education but for safety, structure, and a sense of belonging. It makes sense that the protests erupted there first, and with the most intensity. When people feel that their children have been abandoned, they will take to the streets. And when the state seems deaf to their suffering, the anger will eventually spill over in ways that go beyond any neatly defined list of demands. What began as a movement about schools quickly became a movement about fairness, about recognition, about whether the Republic truly meant what it said when it promised equality to all of its children.
As the protests grew, they changed shape. The initial demands—more teachers, better conditions, a real investment in public education—were still there, but they were increasingly drowned out by the noise of chaos. In some of the most deprived areas, the demonstrations became confrontational. Cars were set on fire. Shops were damaged. Clashes erupted between young people and the police. It is important to remember that this kind of escalation is not a spontaneous expression of some cultural trait; it is what happens when frustration has no channel, when institutions have failed, and when people who feel invisible decide that any attention is better than none. That does not excuse vandalism or violence, but it explains it in human terms. Yet the debate did not remain in those human terms for long. The violent acts, and the heavy-handed responses to them, began to dominate the news cycle. The original grievances were pushed to the margins. Instead of asking why so many schools had become so degraded, or why the burden of that degradation fell so unevenly on certain communities, the conversation shifted to questions of order and control. Politicians talked about restoring authority. The media talked about rioting. And all the while, the children who had been the reason for the protests in the first place were quietly forgotten. The schools remained understaffed. The classrooms remained overcrowded. The buildings remained broken. But the world had moved on to a different story—one that was easier to tell, and far easier to exploit.
It is at this point that a new and deeply disturbing element enters the picture: social media, and the far-right movements that have learned to use it with devastating effectiveness. Within days, a flood of posts appeared across platforms, many of them old videos, many of them unrelated to the protests in France at all, all of them designed to spread one message: this was not about schools, this was about race, religion, and the incompatibility of certain people with European society. The young people shown in the images were often people of color, often Muslim. The fact that the neighborhoods experiencing the worst school shortages were also the neighborhoods where immigrant families and their descendants live was twisted into something sinister. It was not, the narrative insisted, because these communities had been systematically underfunded and marginalized for decades. It was because these communities themselves were the problem. A German MP from the far-right AfD described the unrest as “severe race riots.” The language of race replaced the language of social justice. The protests were no longer a cry for help; they were proof of an existential threat. This kind of framing is not accidental. It is the core strategy of a political movement that feeds on fear and resentment. By stripping the protests of their context, by ignoring the years of neglect and the genuine grievances that drove people into the streets, the far-right was able to transform a desperate act of civic protest into a confirmation of its own dark worldview. And the more outrageous the claim, the more it spread.
Then came the voice that, for millions of people, seemed to give that worldview official approval. Donald Trump, the former President of the United States, added his voice to the chorus. His message was simple, crude, and false: “This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country.” It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the dangerous power of decontextualized outrage. A protest born out of the failure to provide basic educational infrastructure to France’s most vulnerable children was reduced to a single, terrifying image: an invading religion, hostile to Western civilization, using the streets of France as a battleground. There was no mention of the fact that many of the people protesting were French citizens, born and raised in France, with the same hopes and dreams as any other French person. There was no mention of the fact that they were not asking for a different country, but for the one they already had to finally live up to its promises. There was no mention of the teachers who had been struggling for years to keep schools open, or the parents who had been organizing to demand better conditions. None of that mattered. What mattered was the image of young brown and Black men in the streets, and the ancient fear that they represented something alien and hostile. It is a fear that has been weaponized many times before, against many different groups, and it always works the same way: first you dehumanize, then you demonize, then you can do whatever you want.
What is perhaps most striking about this entire episode is the complete absence of evidence to support the claims being made. There is no reliable data showing that people of color, or Muslims, are inherently more violent than anyone else. There is no meaningful statistic that proves a biological or cultural predisposition to chaos. There is no robust body of research, no credible study, no solid evidence of any kind that could justify such a sweeping and hateful generalization. The people spreading these ideas do not need evidence, because their conclusions are already fixed. They are not interested in understanding why protests happen; they are interested in using protests to justify their own agenda. They ignore the obvious explanations—decades of underinvestment in public services, the slow erosion of the integration model, the housing policies that concentrated poverty in certain areas, the labor market discrimination that made it harder for children of immigrants to find stable work. All of that is real. All of that is documented. But it is inconvenient, because if the problem is social and economic, then the solution must also be social and economic. That means spending money, changing policies, and acknowledging failure. It is much easier to say that the problem is cultural, that the problem is religious, that the problem is racial. And if the problem is those things, then the solution is simple: removal. The far-right calls it “remigration,” a polite word for ethnic cleansing. The idea is that people who are not perceived as truly belonging to Europe should be sent back to somewhere else, regardless of whether they were born there, regardless of whether their families have lived there for generations, regardless of whether they have never known any other home. This is not a policy proposal. It is a fantasy of purity, and it is being pushed with increasing openness.
The most disturbing thing about all of this is that we have seen it before. A century ago, similar words were spoken in Germany about Jewish people. They, too, were described as alien, incompatible, a threat to the national soul. They, too, were blamed for the country’s problems, stripped of their humanity, and depicted as an invading force that had to be stopped. The first step was not genocide. The first step was exclusion. The first step was the demand that they leave. Nazi Germany initially sought to make Germany “free of Jews” through persecution, forced emigration, and increasingly, deportation. The language at the time was about removal, about making the nation pure, about protecting the native population from an incompatible element. It was only a few years later that this logic reached its horrific conclusion in the Final Solution. The path was not inevitable, but it was paved with exactly the kind of rhetoric we are hearing today. That is why the comparison is not hyperbolic. It is a warning. When we allow a group of people to be defined as permanently foreign, permanently dangerous, permanently unassimilable, we are taking the first step down a road that history has already shown us ends in unimaginable horror. France, and Europe as a whole, is at a crossroads. One path leads toward the familiar darkness of scapegoating and exclusion. The other path requires the hard, unglamorous work of repairing what has been broken: funding schools, supporting teachers, integrating communities, and acknowledging that the children in those overcrowded classrooms are not invaders. They are the future. The question is whether we are willing to see them that way, or whether we will let the loudest, most hateful voices drown out the truth. The protests that shook France were not a sign that multiculturalism has failed. They were a sign that equality is still a promise waiting to be kept.