In France, the massive protests that peaked on Saturday, October 17, 2026, were more than a domestic political crisis. They were also a mirror, and in that mirror the Islamic Republic of Iran saw not an image of solidarity or shared grievance, but a useful story to twist. As hundreds of thousands of French citizens marched through the streets to demand better education, fair wages, and an end to rising living costs, officials in Tehran and the regime’s sprawling propaganda apparatus were busy manufacturing a parallel reality. According to reporting from IranWire, the Islamic Republic’s response to the French unrest has been a mixture of barefaced fabrications, deliberate distortions, and an almost surreal lack of self-awareness. This is a regime that violently suppresses its own people’s protests, imposes executions, and blinds demonstrators, yet it has had the audacity to lecture France about excessive force and democratic responsibility. The hypocrisy is not accidental. IranWire also confirms that the Islamic Republic has lost one of its most valuable blackmail tools against France: there are currently no French citizens held in Iranian prisons. The last French hostages, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, were released after more than three years of detention and returned home. With France’s public support for Iranian protesters, its temporary visas, and its refusal to be intimidated, Tehran has been left with little more than lies.
The protests themselves began with students, and they grew into a movement that touched nearly every corner of French society. On Monday, September 21, students took to the streets after videos surfaced of violent police encounters during school-related demonstrations. What started as a response to heavy-handed policing rapidly expanded into a broader outcry over the state of education in France. Young people were angry about teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, crumbling school buildings, and relentless budget cuts. They were angry about the widening gap between wealthy and low-income neighborhoods, where the quality of public education has become deeply unequal. As the footage of police confrontations spread across social media, parents and teachers joined the front lines, telling reporters they were there to protect their children during what they saw as peaceful protests. Soon afterward, lawyers and members of the French Parliament added their voices. The movement was no longer just about schools. It was about a country feeling the pressure of economic anxiety and a political system failing to respond. France is also about six months away from a presidential election, and the protests have inevitably become entangled in the electoral drama. Recent polls show Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, in the lead, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing France Unbowed close behind. Both could plausibly advance to the second round. France is known for its political surprises, and the events of October 17 have only made the outcome more unpredictable. When the Yellow Vests, trade unions, and various political factions joined the students, over half a million people marched peacefully for hours against rising living costs and inflation. Organizers put the number at 800,000. Yet this peaceful mass mobilization was largely invisible on Iranian state media. It was only when some demonstrations turned violent that Iranian broadcasters suddenly switched to “live coverage,” eager to present France as a country in chaos while ignoring the honest demands of its citizens.
The Iranian disinformation campaign was not subtle; it was almost crude in its desperation. One of the first lies claimed that internet access had been shut down across France because of the student protests. This was completely false. French internet remained fully operational the entire time. The lie apparently originated from a high-traffic X account known for spreading misinformation, and it was then repeated by Mohammad-Amin Aghamiri, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace. The next day, IRGC-affiliated outlets like Hamshahri and Tasnim published a video claiming to show “riot police inside French schools.” In reality, the footage was filmed in a school in Florida, United States, where police had responded to a reported fight. Later, Tasnim and the Young Journalists Club posted another video supposedly showing “widespread clashes” in France. The post was deleted only after users exposed it as footage from 2022, when violence erupted in Paris following an attack on a Kurdish cultural center. False videos also circulated on social media, including footage of fires near the Eiffel Tower that were actually related to clashes involving Paris Saint-Germain football fans. Several of these posts now carry “False Information” labels on Instagram. Perhaps the most absurd performance came from Bashir Biazar, a state-aligned media figure, who claimed in an interview with the Student News Network that “some students died or entered comas as a result of police actions,” that “a large number of French students have been blinded,” and that the French are “professional machete-wielders who attack to mutilate.” He also claimed that 36 percent of France’s population is Muslim. None of this was true. No students have died or fallen into comas. Two teenagers lost sight in one eye, two teenagers each suffered a hand amputation, and a 14-year-old sustained a fractured jaw and severe dental injuries. These are terrible, life-changing injuries, and they must be condemned. But as the United Nations and the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran documented, the Islamic Republic systematically, intentionally, and broadly blinded its own protesters during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and purposefully killed thousands in January 2026. The difference between police violence and state policy is not a small one, and it is a difference the Islamic Republic desperately wants to erase. Biazar’s claim about France’s Muslim population was also false; a 2020 official survey found that among people aged 18 to 59, approximately 10 percent identified as Muslim. Unsurprisingly, the fact-checking outlet Fact-Nameh gave Biazar’s statements its “Pinocchio” rating, reserved for claims so demonstrably false and ridiculous that they are laughable. In 2024, Biazar had been arrested in France and deported over his alleged ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s intelligence apparatus.
The lies were not limited to social media figures. Iranian officials themselves entered the fray, offering unsolicited advice to the French government with a straight face. After the October 17 protests, and after President Emmanuel Macron linked fuel and energy price increases to the Persian Gulf War, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on social media: “The French people want fundamental changes, including the freedom of assembly. Mr. President, listen to the voice of France’s future.” The cruelty of this statement is hard to overstate. Iranian youth have been denied precisely that future. Their demands for change have been met with imprisonment, torture, street killings, and mass executions. Before Araghchi, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei had commented on the student protests, saying, “France must answer for inappropriate violence against its citizens.” The French government responded by summoning the Islamic Republic’s ambassador in Paris on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, to protest the “disinformation campaign by Iranian officials concerning the French student movement.” In the midst of all this, a group of social media users who oppose the Islamic Republic began posting about “karma,” referring to Ruhollah Khomeini’s return from France in 1979 and the rise of the clergy to power. Some argued that France was now suffering because of its historical interactions with the regime. But political analyst and researcher Mojtaba Najafi pushed back against this trend, calling it “modern ignorance.” He wrote that the movement in France is not monolithic and cannot be reduced to a single slogan. It includes students protesting poor educational quality, teacher shortages, and overcrowded classrooms; Yellow Vests seeking a resurgence; lower-class groups angry about weakened purchasing power; far-left groups and anarchists involved in attacks; and people carrying political, economic, and union demands. “This movement encompasses left and right; it carries political, economic, and union demands. The motivations are varied, and the actors are diverse. The class structure ingrained in your mind since the Cold War era has collapsed.” He also pointed to the decline of state authority, the economic crisis, and a deeper crisis of national identity, all of which make the French protests far more complex than the short, self-serving narratives circulating online.
October 17 is a date that carries a heavy weight in French collective memory. It marks the 1961 massacre, one of the darkest chapters in modern French history, when Paris police violently suppressed a peaceful demonstration by thousands of Algerians, killing many and throwing some victims into the Seine. The protests on October 17, 2026, were not necessarily planned to coincide with that anniversary, but the timing was poignant, especially with the Mayor of Paris present along the Seine during the rallies. It served as a reminder of France’s complicated relationship with its own history of violence, colonial memory, and racial inequality. On the day of the protest, thousands of people marched peacefully for hours. None of that was shown by Iranian state media. Before the official 14:00 start, police dispersed demonstrators, and there were reports of tear gas being fired during a street concert. Several routes to the main gathering point at Place de la République were blocked. As the day wore on, violence escalated. A municipal building in Limoges was set on fire, the doors of a city hall in Marseille were breached, and shops in Paris and other cities were looted. Many protesters openly condemned these acts, insisting that their demands and peaceful demonstrations should not be hijacked by a narrative of destruction. But the media focused heavily on looting and burning images, fueling public outrage and giving ammunition to right-wing factions, both in France and in Iran. Still, French media did not simply accept the government’s version of events. Panel discussions and official statements emphasized the need to distinguish between peaceful protesters and those committing violence. Legal experts and social scientists reminded viewers that even unacceptable actions like looting and destruction have root causes, and that if the country wants to prevent such outcomes, it must address the policies that produced them. A French student who participated in every protest told IranWire: “It is laughable that the Iranian regime engages in mass murder and executes protesters, yet shows such audacity in distorting and exploiting our protests. We will continue our protests. They must not only hear our voice but also address our demands. Our generation knows only Macron, and we are dissatisfied with Macron and his policies. We do not want right-wing movements either. We see the crimes of the Iranian regime and will not remain silent. Our generation seeks social justice and equality for all people. Neither the Islamic Republic nor any government has the right to co-opt or distort our voice.” According to the French Interior Ministry, 2,397 people were arrested between the October 17 protests and October 19, 2026; 855 of those arrests were in Paris. Arrests are not convictions, however. By October 13, at least 36 official investigations had been opened into police violence during student protests, and the Human Rights League had received 85 related reports. Four more investigations were registered regarding events on October 17 and 18. Seven police officers were severely injured during the October 17 protests, and no official count of injured protesters was released. Iranian media also reported that prominent Iranian photographer Alfred Yaghobzadeh was injured during the protests; IranWire followed up with him, and he confirmed that his condition had improved. Meanwhile, Le Monde reported that more than 460,000 posts had been published on TikTok and other social media platforms to organize student protests from late September to October 17.
What all of this reveals is not just the Islamic Republic’s dishonesty, but its profound fear of the truth. In France, protests are covered even when they are critical of the president. Media outlets publish investigations into police violence without being shut down. People are allowed to question the government’s actions, to expose its failures, and to demand change without facing execution. The Iranian regime, by contrast, treats every one of these freedoms as a crime punishable by imprisonment, torture, and death. And so it hides behind fabricated videos, false statistics, and the paid voices of discredited propagandists. It lectures France about democracy while crushing the most basic democratic demands of its own people. It claims to defend the oppressed while systematically blinding and killing its own citizens. The French protests are messy, complicated, and full of contradictions, but they are real. The Islamic Republic’s narrative is none of these things. It is a controlled, edited, and sanitized version of reality, produced by a regime that has lost the ability to confront the truth even when it is looking directly at it. The young French protester who spoke with IranWire expressed the very thing the Islamic Republic cannot tolerate: hope grounded in justice. In France, that hope can still be spoken out loud. In Iran, speaking it can get you killed. But no amount of propaganda can change the fact that the French people marched peacefully by the hundreds of thousands, that their voices were heard, and that the world was watching. The Islamic Republic can distort and fabricate and repeat its tired lies again and again, but it cannot make the truth disappear. The truth remains, waiting to be seen.