The French are revolting. It’s a tradition with them. Riots are as French as croissants, adultery and the 35-hour work week.

France’s current riots may, however, presage the fall of the Fifth Republic.

Mobs of students in the streets. Schools going up in flames. Police using tear gas and flash-ball guns. Hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests.

The spark for the disorder was strikes by left-wing teachers and other public-sector workers, including firemen. The students besieged their schools at once.

The truants claim they’re protesting overcrowded and underfunded schools. 

Nothing says “Please address schoolroom overcrowding” like setting fire to a fireman and filming it. 

Nothing says “Please raise the biggest education budget in the OECD” like a masked youth kicking a policewoman in the head.

The disorder is backed by the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is second in the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

The riots, French intelligence agencies told a government crisis meeting on Oct. 1, originated as “an operation organized by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left.”

“LFI has always advocated non-violent demonstrations,” LFI parliamentary deputy Louis Boyard replied.

Meanwhile on the streets of Paris, LFI deputy Thomas Portes was filmed shoving police officers. LFI deputy Bally Bagayoko, who has said that “violence is legitimate,” danced with a student mob at the gates of their school amid burning trash cans.

LFI’s deputies joined the protests all over France. They exhorted students at barricades and led chants of “Free Palestine.” When the students started fires and threw projectiles at the police, LFI’s deputies intervened to protect the rioters.

“We must protect the youth from the forces of disorder,” LFI Euro-parliamentarian Anthony Smith said.

“We’ll attack all the police stations in the country,” Ritchy Thibault, a former parliamentary assistant to LFI deputy Ersilia Soudais told students at a Paris school on Oct. 2. “We’re going to set fire to the Élysée [France’s equivalent of the White House]. We’re going to blow everything up.”

“What you’re doing is incredible,” Mélenchon said when he visited a student protest on Oct. 6. 

So far, so French. The French wrote the script of political street theater. One revolution was enough for the English and the Americans, but the French tolerance for mass disturbance is as high as their cholesterol.

Boyard, a k a Monsieur Non-Violence, was nothing if not faithful to this grand tradition when he led a mob of students at Paris-Est-Créteil University in singing France’s revolutionary marching song and national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

But Boyard sang it surrounded by masked youths. And the flag he raised was not the red, white and bleu of le tricolore. It was the Palestinian flag.

These riots are not just about France’s schools. They are the latest battle between the French state and the “New French,” France’s rapidly growing, poorly assimilated and heavily Muslim population. The French call them “immigrants” even though many of them are French-born.

Long before Mayor Mamdani came to America and the DSA took out their student loans, the French saw the emergence of an Islamogauchiste (Islamo-leftist) alliance between the old radicals of the left and the angry youth of the banlieues, the peripheral housing estates.

The same strategy created the voter base of the ruling Labour Party in the UK. In September, the strategy swung Sweden’s national elections and Berlin’s mayoral elections to left-wing parties that cultivate ethnic bloc votes. It has reshaped the Democrats’ ground game in states such as New York and Michigan. 

Mélenchon may be happy to see the schools burn, but he knows his electoral math. The Immigration and Demography Observatory, a French think tank, predicts that on current trends, French citizens with no immigrant parent or grandparent will become a minority around 2050.

Mélenchon, a 75-year-old ex-communist, is an old leftist but also a new immigrant. Born and raised in Morocco, he came to France in 1962, one among the millions who crossed the Mediterranean as Europe’s empires folded.

He calls French democracy a design for “white privilege” and “part of an already obsolete present.” He wants a “citizen’s revolution” to create a “new France.” He calls the right-winger Marine Le Pen, who leads the polls for 2027, a “fascist.”

Only days before the protests began, the French turned out to greet Pope Leo XIV. Mélenchon and the LFI have helped to turn the same streets into the stage of bloodshed and destruction.

“In just one week, we have been able to see in our streets the two Frances that now face each other on our soil,” Mélenchon’s rival Éric Zemmour, the right-wing anti-immigration politician, said on Sept. 30.

Zémmour, the French-born son of Berber Jews from Algeria, sees a stand-off between the old France of the Fifth Republic, “largely white, Christian, European, even if various minorities join it,” and “another France that is largely African, Arab, Muslim,” and waves “Algerian, Moroccan or Palestinian flags” as symbols of its resentment.

“Eternal France against the new France: that will be the showdown of the 2027 presidential election,” Zémmour predicts. Mélenchon agrees. So does Le Pen.

While Mélenchon and the LFI push France off the cliff for electoral gain, a people and their state are coming apart. The political center cannot hold. The markets are turning on France’s debt-loaded economy. 

France is one of the great democratic nations. It is a nuclear-armed Security Council member, and one of the two pillars of the European Union. But no nation is too big to fail. 

Dominic Green (@DrDominicGreen) is a Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner columnist.