Over the past two weeks, France has once again erupted into a state of urban rebellion, marked by nationwide university occupations, high-school blockades, and fierce street confrontations that reached a bloody climax on 17 October. What began as a localised wave of youth agitation – triggered by a combination of police violence, infrastructural decay, and the use of Parcoursup, France’s opaque university admissions platform – has expanded into a broader social crisis, drawing together the unhealed grievances of the Gilets Jaunes and the enduring indignations of people living in the banlieues.

The state’s answer has been uncompromising and militarised. Deploying battlefield-grade crowd control, mass preemptive detentions, and fast-track sentencing, the executive has used the familiar arsenal of counter-insurgency in an attempt to pacify its own streets. It is an irony that the height of this repression fell on 17 October, a date marked in French history by the 1961 massacre and drowning of Algerian protestors in the Seine, whose legacy echoes in the chants of today’s youth.

Rather than recognising the protesters’ demand for a livable future – “a desirable life” as the slogan goes – both the centre and the far right have orchestrated a classic moral panic. The uprisings are redescribed not as a crisis of neoliberal legitimacy, but as an existential threat: a barbarian, ‘Third World’ infiltration imperiling the white Western order. This civilisational framing, in which the suburbs are cast as hostile zones within the nation, serves to absolve the state of social concessions while cementing a governing coalition around the reactionary promise of zero personal sacrifice and total exclusion.

To understand the crisis, we spoke with Chowra Makaremi and Michel Feher, whose combined insights trace both the immediate state repression and the deeper, far-right political imaginaries recasting the terms of contemporary European revolt.

Gavin Jacobson: What’s the mood in Paris right now?

Chowra Makaremi: I’m speaking from EHESS, a university occupied by students and closed like most others right now. In some ways, it reminds me of the testimonies I collected during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings in Iran. People would describe daily life as feeling completely normal, even while vibrant demonstrations filled television screens. We’re living in a double temporality: on one side, the rhythm of demonstrations – about four in the last two weeks, peaking on 17 October; on the other, the rhythm of the everyday, saturated by a media discourse centred on police responses and moral panic over the riots.

While there are new dynamics at play in this moment of political ferment, there are also echoes of recent struggles and indignations, all now resonating together – whether it’s the global student movement against the Gaza genocide in 2024, the 2023 riots in working-class neighbourhoods over the police murder of Nahel Merzouk, or the “eco-anger” in working-class districts that were hit hardest by the recent heatwaves. Finally, the unaddressed demands of the Gilets Jaunes, stifled by Covid-19 but never resolved, are resurfacing. Although the left emerged as the largest parliamentary bloc after the 2024 legislative elections, this never translated into representation or institutional power. Now, high school students who were only eight to ten years old at the peak of the Gilets Jaunes are chanting their slogans.

Michel Feher: I think the situation is in a temporary lull. What’s at stake right now is a radical clash of interpretations over the events of 17 October.

For the government and the mainstream media, the narrative is entirely about “senseless violence”. Macron echoed the former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who after the 2015 terrorist attacks said that “To try to understand is already to justify, and this is unjustifiable.” The implication is that while the protestors might theoretically have legitimate grievances, we can’t discuss them because the violence eclipses everything else. The only acceptable response is police force, curfews, and the threat of a state of emergency – if only to calm the anxieties of the bond market vigilantes.

Marine Le Pen has been more subtle. She separates “violent youth from racialised neighbourhoods” from “good students” with legitimate grievances, while offering a platform that criminalises the former but fails to address the latter. Her narrative blames government incompetence and demands even harsher crackdowns, especially against the racialised youth that she blames for the unrest.

The left, meanwhile, is caught in a bind. On the one hand, the high school movement, university students and Gilets Jaunes seemed to point toward the long-sought “convergence des luttes”. More importantly, perhaps, the genius of this current movement was its joyfulness and its core demand: we want to study in order to build a desirable life.

Contrast that with the National Rally’s vision – shortening education to fast-track youth into low-skill jobs before AI replaces them – or Europe’s project to turn the continent into a fortified retirement home. When youth demand a desirable life, it offers the left an opening: to campaign on making that life possible and rallying parents against the National Rally’s bleak future.

The tactical dilemma for the left after Saturday is stark. Either it calls the protesters peaceful and blames a violent fringe, which plays into Le Pen’s hands by dividing “good” (coded white) protesters from “barbaric” rioters. Or it justifies the violence as understandable rage, which strips the movement of its core power (joy and the demand for a desirable life) and reduces it to anger against existing conditions.

Anglophone liberals like to say these riots discredit the French left and give strength to Le Pen. Does that reading seem correct to you?

Chowra Makaremi: There is a tendency to treat uprisings of any kind as mere gifts to the far right. This makes the protestors responsible for how others weaponise their anger. It’s a convenient trap: blame those who rise up for how political elites manipulate their anger and desire for change.

This movement is about much more than rage – it is an experience of active citizenship and political subjectivation. Its energy is driven by youth. High school and university students are coordinating across the baccalauréat divide: because high schools are currently on break, university students are maintaining the momentum until secondary students return.

Through this shared struggle, high schoolers and undergraduates recognise themselves as part of a single continuum. A major driver of this unity is Parcoursup, the platform using opaque algorithms to assign university placements to high school applicants. The system dictates students’ choices and daily lives, replacing meaningful qualifications with algorithmic conformity based on grades, subjects and extracurriculars. This is creating a generational anxiety and comes amid a severe youth mental health crisis in France, where pediatric psychiatric wards have been overwhelmed since Covid-19.

The students are confronting police repression and crumbling school infrastructure, and they are rejecting forms of algorithmic control. Media coverage heavily distorts this: 75% focuses on violence, ignoring their articulate demands on public defunding, the rule of law, ecological survival, antiracism and Palestine. Online, thousands of micro-confrontations on social media capture the true political stakes that corporate media erases. One striking slogan from 17 October adapted the famous feminist line “We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” into: “We are the children of the Algerians you didn’t drown in the Seine in 1961”. Antifascism is central here, too – “Siamo tutti antifascisti” has become the defining soundtrack of these protests.

When students mobilised for basic needs, the government responded with patronising “adultism”, telling them to go back to class. This mirrors grassroots movements like Cancer Colère (linking hospital defunding, oncological violence and environmental toxins), showing how bottom-up resistance is building a coherent democratic alternative against fascisation.

What's driving this instinct on the right and centre to frame uprisings as a “civilisational attack” by Arab and Muslim youth?

Michel Feher: It’s important to have some political context here. The far right is falsely presented as “anti-systemic”, pushing for radical change. In reality, they offer a unique electoral pact: “put us in power, and nothing will have to change for you”.

While the left demands systemic sacrifice (redistribution, lifestyle changes for climate) and neoliberals demand rugged self-reliance, the far right promises zero personal sacrifice. Their pitch is: we will eliminate the parasites – foreigners, the unemployed and corrupt elites – and your life instantly improves without the need to alter your habits.

This leaves the left paralysed in a liberal imaginary, waiting for the equivalent of Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” to validate their claims. With centre- and far-right blocs merging, and in a proto-fascist environment, where the traditional tripartite division of the electorate – a radical left, a reasonable centre and a far right – is dissolving, that impartial authority does not exist. So the left hesitates between moral outrage – but addressed to whom? – and taking stock of the fact that there is no longer anything between fascism and antifascism.

With the presidential election looming, young racialised kids already experience fascism daily through police terror. They live in terror of police encounters and might feel there is little difference between today’s status quo and a National Rally government. (Though I believe a National Rally government would make their situation demonstrably worse, I fully understand why they might not see a difference.)

The high school movement offered a divine surprise: young people championing education and a desirable life. My immediate fear now is that the left risks losing that momentum and letting this crucial moment slip away.

How does the framing of suburban populations as uncivilised enable the state to deploy methods of order originally reserved for colonial territories or external borders?

Chowra Makaremi: The police response to legal demonstrations has been violent, utilising military-grade weaponry. By unleashing this level of force against nearly a million peaceful marchers, the state effectively clears the streets of regular demonstrators, who are forced to flee for their safety, leaving behind only rioters engaged in violent confrontations. The human toll is immediate: protesters losing limbs, being blinded or suffering beatings.

We need to view the security response not merely as a reaction, but as a central protagonist shaping the entire situation. The state’s management of protests actively dictates how events are framed.

The “second round” of any uprising is always fought in the courtrooms, and that is where we are now. Over the first three weeks of this month-long movement, police took more than 6000 young people into custody. I emphasise youth because 85% were under the age of 18. This figure eclipses the 2005 uprisings in working-class neighborhoods – areas where racialised French youth face extreme segregation in housing, transit and public services. In 2005, following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, police detentions totaled under 5,000 over several months. Today, we reached 8,000 in a single month, a number surpassed only by events like 17 October 1961, when police detained over 12,000 Algerians in Paris, killing hundreds and throwing their bodies into the Seine.

This represents an extraordinarily radicalised, repressive response, extending to society at large forms of policing developed against colonial and postcolonial subalternised populations, especially given that today’s movement spans a broad demographic, including high schoolers, university students, trade unionists, teachers, parents and Gilets Jaunes.

Those held in custody are funneled into fast-track trials (comparutions immédiates) rather than released. Fast-track trials became a primary instrument of governance during and after the 2005 riots. In my research on comparutions immédiates between 2010 and 2011, I observed how this system functions as a mechanism for managing the urban poor.¹

While French justice claims to be colour-blind, enforcement is deeply racialised: your demographic profile dictates whether a minor infraction, like cannabis possession, lands you in a fast-track court, and, once there, the probability of receiving a prison sentence.

This judicial pipeline actively manufactures data. Sociologists, demographers and journalists take these court statistics to compile a “sociodemography” of the revolt, presenting it as hard, objective truth: ‘Look, 80% of rioters come from these specific neighborhoods.’ But those figures exist only because police and courts specifically targeted those populations to build their numbers. Repression creates the very data used to validate the government’s narrative.

This strategy – a legacy of 20 years of dismantling the welfare state in favour of a security state – produces a demographic profile of “rioters” tailored to fit the National Rally’s political discourse.

Finally, this security apparatus relies heavily on colonial tools and strategies: curfews, mass detentions and military-grade crowd-control gear, including water cannons and tear gas grenades, the same types of technologies deployed in occupied territories like the West Bank.

Michel, can you elaborate on what you’ve described as “technocracy of security” and how it is being deployed in this situation of urban rebellion and riot?

Michel Feher: This technocracy is defined by the unchecked expansion of executive power over the legislative and judicial branches that took place under Nicolas Sarkozy via unelected préfets. We see this same dynamic across the US and the UK: as executive overreach expands, the other branches of government are initially sidelined, only to eventually become rubber-stamps for executive mandates.

But I think it’s important to note that controlling suburban populations is no longer simply a continuation of colonial rule. While today’s police apparatus inherits counter-insurgency tactics from the colonial era, there has been a fundamental shift in the political imaginary that began in the 1980s, coinciding with the initial rise of the far right.

That shift occurred when the right, the far right and the public more broadly accepted a new reality: the empire is gone. It’s over. The modern far right emerged out of a reactionary impulse: “If they don't want us over there, we don't want them over here.” Today's goal is not assimilation, a ‘civilising’ mission or subjugation, but exclusion and removal. The underlying logic is not one of domination, but of cleansing.

This is why Israel serves as such a core paradigm for the modern far right. It is not about ruling over Palestinians; it is about eliminating their presence altogether. It resembles settler-colonialism where the goal is to erase the native population rather than integrate them as a subordinate labour force. While mass deportation is not yet feasible in Europe, the far right fixates on Israel because it executes precisely what they dream of doing to racialised minorities at home.

Emphasising continuity with late-stage colonialism misses this crucial ideological shift. In America, Trumpism dreads the idea of projecting the “American way of life” globally because it invites immigration – MAGA demands hard borders, mass deportations and a retrenchment toward a white, Christian nation. Europe follows the same logic, but with an aging demographic.

That is why I describe the current European project as a fortified retirement home: an aging population that wants to be left alone to indulge in its isolation, unbothered by anyone younger or less white.

While the policing tactics – curfews, mass detentions, militarised crowd control – look identical to counter-insurgency methods used during the Algerian War, their purpose has changed. The far right’s dream is not to enslave the racialised banlieues, but to make them disappear entirely; just as the ultimate objective of the Israeli right is to never see a Palestinian again.

Chowra, Viewing these revolts through collective mourning, emotion, and what you call “affective resistance”, what is newly revealed about them?

Chowra Makaremi: Returning to Michel’s point about what the far right offers voters: the transactional promise or electoral pact appeals to self-interest, but self-interest is far from the whole story. Fascism and the process of fascisation are deeply driven by intense emotions: existential panic, fears of “submersion”, and what can only be called the “passion of supremacy” – an affective state where any move toward equality is experienced as an invasion or a “Great Replacement”.

Feminist theorists offer crucial insights here. Verónica Gago, for example, analyses fascisation as a reaction to a double bind: individuals internalise the demands of the neoliberal subject (‘you are the sole master of your destiny’) while simultaneously experiencing intense economic exploitation and precariousness. The tension between these contradictory realities leaves people vulnerable to the emotional appeal and manipulation of fascism.

If we take this seriously – as Wilhelm Reich did in his early analysis of Nazism – we realise that fascism cannot be countered solely through rational, democratic debate or appeals to shared policy interests. A purely rational approach leaves entire domains of emotional life unaddressed and available for fascist capture. The contradictions of neoliberalism cannot be overcome simply by believing in reasonable ideas.

So how do we occupy the affective and emotional terrain? How do we stop treating street revolts as outbursts of “irrational rage” that supposedly threaten reasonable, policy-driven politics?

Humans simply do not operate on reason alone. That is why I speak of affective sovereignty – much like food sovereignty, we need emotional sovereignty over our political lives. Consider what Michel described as the joy of revolt, or what I referred to as the process of political subjectivation: citizens make demands of the state, face police repression, and then adapt their strategy into a grassroots revolt driven by its own slogans and collective solidarity. These moments are rich with emotion and attachments; parents stepping up to protect their children, or young people demanding a desirable future.

Affective politics should not be viewed merely as a threat to democracy, but as vital terrain to occupy. It allows us to rebuild political subjectivities that reclaim control over our collective imagination. At its core, politics is a battle of imagination.

In France, after Macron dissolved the National Assembly following the far right’s surge in the European elections, an anti-fascist left coalition won the legislative elections. Yet, that electoral victory never yielded a prime minister or government from that coalition. The result was a profound collective trauma, one so disorienting that people could barely process it. Technocratic figures with no popular or representative legitimacy were installed, simply abiding by the president’s will. Foreign colleagues visiting France would ask: ‘Why isn’t anyone talking about this governance?’ It felt like a widespread experience of powerlessness and a pervasive sense that the public is fundamentally inaudible to those in power. Normally, that feeling of powerlessness fuels the far right, because it operates entirely within the emotional sphere. That is why political imagination and emotional sovereignty are important.

Revolts, protests and collective street actions – as well as the thousands of digital political scenes shared online – are moments that reconnect us to an active, shared emotional-political life. They restore our agency. The more we dismiss these emotional dimensions of resistance, the more territory we yield to the fascisation of society.

We seem to be entering a global age of riots. Uprisings are underway in France, Spain, Albania, India and now Argentina. Has urban unrest become a defining feature of twenty-first-century politics, and how should we make sense of it?

Michel Feher: I don’t view these uprisings as a sign of some general pre-revolutionary stage, exciting as they are, but hopefully as a prelude to a reopening of the left imaginary.

I agree with Chowra’s concepts of the “politics of attachment” and the “politics of cruelty”. However, regarding the politics of cruelty, there is a dimension worth adding beyond its role in disciplining, keeping people in line, and stunning the public: the politics of cruelty also produces joy. It brings pleasure not only to those inflicting the cruelty, but also to spectators who feel that by enjoying the spectacle of state cruelty, they are placing themselves on the “right side” of order.

Where I would offer a word of caution is on opposing reason to affect. Coming from a Spinozist tradition, I see them not as two separate registers but as one: an affect is concentrated reasoning, and reasoning is a fully developed affect. This is not merely a theoretical distinction; it has direct political implications.

Take the far right – you can see how affect and reasoning are inextricably linked. The affect of resentment manifests as a belief that ‘someone else is enjoying what should rightfully be mine.’ The resentful logic follows: ‘I want authority and the state to go after those people so that what is mine is finally restored to me.’ The policy demand is simply the intellectual unfolding of resentful emotion.

The counterpoint to resentment is an affect of generosity and indignation – not indignation that someone is stealing from me, but outrage that an injustice is taking place. It stems from the realisation that inequality hinders everyone’s freedom, even those not directly targeted. To borrow that well-known cry, “I can’t breathe.” That sense of suffocation must similarly be developed into a coherent political rationale.

We must also avoid unwarranted optimism. The left remains a minority almost everywhere. The central question is how to transform these core affects – the desire for a breathable environment, the demand for a desirable life – into concrete policies and structured arguments.

These movements – simultaneously joyful and rageful – represent a moment of pause and suspense. They present an open question: Can this emotion be converted into pathways towards a desirable life?

Seen this way, these explosive moments are less about immediate insurrection and more about the budding of a collective reasoning; the initial spark of a shared project. That is why their occurrence is vital. But they must be carefully translated, not by waiting for a political saviour with a pre-packaged manifesto, but gradually, through resonance, local attachments, and specific projects that connect with one another.

The core challenge is speed. The far right possesses a fast-track mechanism to convert its resentful affects into immediate policy. The left, by contrast, operates on a slower timeline: our response requires explaining complexity, taking time, and thinking deeply. This puts the left at an inherent disadvantage on the electoral stage, making victories rare. When those rare victories occur, we must build on them as much as possible, knowing they can be fleeting.

The sparks we are seeing across Spain, Italy, Albania, France, Argentina and India should not be mistaken for the onset of a unified global revolution with a single headline message. Rather, they are dispersed points of resonance that still need to be tuned to one another.

This is precisely where Chowra’s politics of attachment becomes essential. It is the delicate art of weaving these struggles together, finding the time and space to build solidarity attentively, without being crushed by police repression or the politics of cruelty.

Chowra Makaremi: Between 2019 and 2022, from Sudan and Chile to Iran, from the Gilets Jaunes to Black Lives Matter, we saw a wave of uprisings that did resonate with one another. Feminism was deeply rooted in that wave, built on the momentum of movements like Ni Una Menos.

However, a clear rupture occurred in 2023 with the transition into a global war regime. This war regime creates fertile ground for antifeminist, counterrevolutionary politics. Our primary challenge today is navigating this shift: while uprisings still resonate across borders, political subjectivities themselves have become increasingly militarised on a global scale.

In confronting this challenge, we must recognise how deeply political imagination is tied to resisting the far right. The experience of powerlessness is precisely what kills political imagination. And destroying political imagination is not an accidental byproduct – it is a central objective of the politics of cruelty.

Insisting on a desirable future reopens that imagination. As Michel pointed out, emotion and reason, strategy and sensitivity, are not compartmentalised; they are intertwined. Re-engaging with that vibrant movement of the collective mind is precisely where the creativity needed to counter powerlessness will emerge. We have to put ourselves in motion again.

For me, debates over pessimism versus optimism are secondary to a fundamental practice: the commitment to remain on the side of the open.

Right now, the youth have opened up a new space. Exactly who these youth are, or what their precise sociodemographic breakdown looks like, remains difficult to quantify, even in France. But something real has opened in the public sphere and within the urban space. We must locate ourselves inside this openness and think from within it, because that political desire is the source from which creative, practical responses will flow.

1. Makaremi, C. “The right to punish: Assessing sentences in immediate appearance trials.” in Fassin, D. et al. At the heart of the state: The moral world of institutions. Pluto Books, 2015