France is again burning from the schoolyard outward. In the last days of September and the first of October 2026, a protest that began in the poorer lycées of the Paris banlieues spread across the country: bins alight in Rennes, fireworks hurled at police lines in Marseille, tear gas in Strasbourg, a school set ablaze in Nantes and another damaged by fire in Le Havre. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called the climate of violence unacceptable. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin counted roughly two thousand arrests, most of them teenagers; other tallies put the week’s detentions near five thousand. Some three hundred officers and gendarmes were injured in a single day. Sixty-five education staff, including forty principals, were hurt. In Paris a female officer was chased, knocked down, and beaten while the crowd shouted to kill her. In Marseille a principal and his deputy were doused with gasoline. This is not a quarrel over timetables. It is the same suburban pattern that has recurred since 2005, now wearing the costume of a student strike.

The Interior Ministry’s own 2025 balance sheet shows the longer trend beneath the flare-up. Recorded physical violence rose 5 percent, attempts at homicide another 4 percent, and sexual violence 8 percent. Homicides held at 975 victims. An internal police document reported by Le Journal du Dimanche put foreigners at 20.2 percent of those implicated in violence against persons in the first eight months of 2026, against about 9 percent of the population, and at nearly 29 percent of those implicated in theft. Minors were 14.6 percent of those implicated in violence, and that share was rising. Seine-Saint-Denis, where the present unrest took root, is already a department in which immigrants and the children of immigrants form a large majority. Christopher Caldwell’s old diagnosis still fits: a parallel population was imported, then told that France owed it the Republic’s schools, benefits, and patience, while the Republic was forbidden to ask for France in return. The result is a youth that treats the lycée as occupied ground and the officer as a foreign soldier.

Right-wing Francophiles have spent a generation admiring the language, the cathedrals, and the cuisine while declining the only political act that would preserve them. Admiration is not a policy. The factions that still prefer Pascal to the grievance sermon, the village to the cité, and the Code Civil to the parallel order must stop treating one another as the principal enemy. Expulsion is not a metaphor and not a mood. It is the ordinary sovereign power to remove foreign nationals who riot, assault, or refuse the law, and to end the settlement policies that replenish the ranks. A nation that will not do this will keep counting burned schools and injured principals, and will call the arithmetic a social problem. France has the legal means. What it has lacked is a right willing to use them together.

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