Michael Murphy: Parisian looters brought to you by the European left

A shop is vandalized and looted during demonstrations on October 17, 2026 in Paris, France. Photo by Carl Court /Getty Images

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Over the weekend, the supposed campaign by France’s youth for better classroom conditions took a detour through Marseille’s Louis Vuitton. Looters armed with hammers and crowbars also cleaned out Hermes and Rolex. According to one estimate, just under half the stores in the city centre were looted by a crowd police say reached 30,000. The bookstores, as far as anyone can tell, were spared.

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The looters, who ransacked some 1,500 stores across France, seemed to view their work as a kind of redistributive justice. One Parisian store was graffitied: “This is for the high school students.” It did not specify which high school. One wonders if the Lycee Nelson Mandela in Nantes, a delightful newbuild completed in 2014 and set alight earlier this month, was among those the looters felt they were championing. Indeed, there appears to be little correlation between the schools being torched and those which are underfunded. And the looters are yet to put forward an argument for the educational benefits of a Louis Vuitton handbag.

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What began in earnest one month ago as a campaign around classroom sizes and staff shortages has hardened into wanton criminality. The scars left on French cities in recent weeks leave little doubt: torched cars and buildings, more than a thousand injured police officers, dozens of teachers assaulted, and several hundred million euros in damage.

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Yet it is clear that many of those still marching, to borrow a line from Chaucer, know little of the things for which they pray. One woman, reportedly a left-wing protester, was filmed imploring her erstwhile comrades to stop looting a store. “This isn’t the cause,” she screamed at a group of balaclava-clad, predominantly migrant-descended French youths. She was ignored, and eventually pushed aside, by young men who evidently felt otherwise.

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As if to address her case directly, the right-wing former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour posted on X: “There are little whites among the looters, of course. As Audiard used to say, there are flying fish, but they are not the majority of the species.”

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He added: “The Great Replacement is not a theory; it is a fact.”

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It is true that the majority of the footage that I have reviewed in recent weeks has shown a preponderance of ethnic minority rioters. Foreign flags, especially those of Palestine, Algeria and Morocco, have made regular appearances, while tricolours are rather thin on the ground. Given the riots’ aesthetic and demographic makeup, politicians on the right may feel increasingly emboldened to issue statements of this kind — which reflect the existential tenor with which the unrest has been received among right-wing populists the world over; as well as the enormous stakes voters of all hues will feel going into the presidential elections in April.

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U.S. Vice-President JD Vance posted footage on X of the town hall of Limoges, a neo-renaissance building built in 1883, engulfed in flames. He felt there was a universal lesson behind the building’s crumbling campanile.