I grew up in Paris from the ages of 10 to 13. I spent most of my education there at a boarding school outside of Paris and when I was home on summer break, my mother sent us off to summer camp. Nothing like complete submersion in order to learn a foreign language.
So, malheuresement, I never participated in a good ol’ fashion Paris riot as I was often out of town. I remember speaking to a French friend about her attending one. She said it was loads of fun to yell at “les flics” (the cops) and march through the streets. Then, everyone would go home feeling like they had vented enough.
I remember a writer (possibly William Shirer) who wrote about the Parisian riots back in the day (1930s). I don’t feel like reading through the volumes that Shirer wrote to try to confirm that it was him right now. In any case, the journalist covering a Parisian protest noticed a very curious phenomena. The police would be smacking protesters, the protesters would be throwing things at the gendarmes. Then, around 11:30 at night, the crowds would start dying down. At midnight, all the protesters and the police would be getting on the last metro trains running out of the city center and the streets would be calm. The metro closed at midnight and both the police and protesters rode home together almost as if they hadn’t been at each others throats just moments before. But, that was when Paris was full of heritage French, Français de souche, and the whole nation was uniformly of one overwhelming same ethnicity. Imagine that happening today.
I remember my father telling me a story from the early 70s about a time when he had gone to Paris on business (before the whole family had moved there). He said that he was in the back of a café on the left bank of Paris having lunch with an elderly scientist. The business meeting had gone successfully (probably with a glass or two of wine knowing the French and my dad). So, they went outside and found themselves suddenly in the middle of a full blown student riot that they had no idea was happening when they were in the back of the café. My dad said one of the gendarmes came running up to him swinging his jacket. Apparently, at the time, the French police had leather jackets with lead weights sewn into the bottom. They would take off their jackets and swing them around knocking protestors to the ground. My father said he was so stunned he just stood there looking at the cop. The cop looked at my father, then glanced at the elderly professor (who my father said had crazy looking uncoiffed grey hair), then turned and ran off to clock another French student with his jacket.
After my family and I left Paris in the early 1980s, the Parisian riots turned more violent. Reports of cars being set on fire became more and more routine.
I asked both Brave AI and duckduckgo AI when the rioters in France started to set cars on fire because when I was a kid in Paris, it was just not a thing. I got two different answers. Duckduckgo gave me 1981 as the first time this started happening at a riot in Lyon. Here’s what their AI told me:
“It wasn’t a single, organized protest over one issue. I should clarify my earlier wording: the 1981 unrest around Les Minguettes, near Lyon, was a series of disturbances amid strained relations between young people—many of North African origin—and police, alongside discrimination and social exclusion. Contemporary accounts also point to anger over threatened deportations after earlier clashes with police. The car thefts and burnings were part of the unrest, but they weren’t all tied to one specific protest demand.”
So, there was definitely an element of immigration involved in vehicle arson.
Brave AI gave me the late 1990s when the trend really took off in Strasbourg with New Year’s Eve celebrations. It goes on to tell me that the 2005 suburban riots had 8,000 vehicles torched. O.K., what was the cause of the 2005 riot?
“The 2005 French riots were triggered by the accidental deaths of two teenagers — Zyed Benna (15, of Tunisian descent) and Bouna Traoré (17, of Malian descent) — who were electrocuted on October 27, 2005 after climbing into an electrical substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor suburb east of Paris, allegedly while hiding from police. A third teen was seriously burned.”
AI gave me this quote from Aristotle “Politics Book V section III”
So, the left is screaming and trying to gaslight the general public that the riots are just French kids who want more teachers to teach them chemistry and they want us to ignore the school fires and the teachers doused in gasoline.
Riot porn:
The media lies to the left and the unthinking public just seems to lap it up. At this point, how can you possibly believe them on anything?
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
