Summary
France's civil unrest is presented as the culmination of decades of intellectual and political movements that have reframed revolutionary violence as justified resistance to historical oppression. Jean-Paul Sartre's defense of anti-colonial violence, Algeria's influence on Palestinian nationalism, and the development of Third Worldist ideology are linked to contemporary political radicalism. France's unresolved colonial legacy, immigration challenges, and competing interpretations of national identity have intensified divisions over accountability and integration. The central argument is that restoring social stability requires both confronting historical injustices and reaffirming the legitimacy of democratic institutions and the rule of law.
Key Takeaways
- The Intellectual Roots of Political Violence: Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of revolutionary violence helped establish a framework in which terrorism and civil unrest could be portrayed as legitimate resistance to oppression. This reasoning influenced anti-colonial movements and continues to shape debates about political violence, responsibility, and justice.
- The Algeria-Palestine Connection: Algeria's independence movement provided an ideological and organizational model for Palestinian nationalism. The convergence of socialist revolutionary movements and Islamist causes created enduring political alliances united by opposition to Western influence and perceived colonial injustice.
- France's Crisis of National Identity: France faces deep divisions over its colonial legacy, immigration, integration, and national identity. The tension between acknowledging historical injustices and maintaining civic unity raises questions about whether historical grievances can be addressed without legitimizing contemporary violence.
Amid the crowds in France’s riots and protests, Algerian and Palestinian flags appeared. At the Place de la République, protesters climbed Marianne’s statue and raised the Palestinian flag above the symbol of the Republic.
The unrest began in September, when high school students in the Paris suburbs complained about teacher shortages and crumbling buildings. But those grievances do not explain mortar fire at school gates, assaults on principals, and a fire engine seized and burned in Marseille. Nor do they explain why the La France Insoumise (LFI) mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, told French television that violence could, at a given moment, be legitimate.
As some observers have noted, riots in France are a rite of passage. These riots are different. Today’s sustained chaos, rampant destruction and violence are the long-term result of bad philosophy that emanated from France itself.
Few ideas have done more damage in France than Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of justified violence. In his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, written at the height of the Algerian War, Sartre argued that colonial violence came first and that the violence of the colonized was merely its return: “the moment of the boomerang.” To shoot down a European, he wrote, was “to kill two birds with one stone,” leaving behind “a dead man, and a free man.”
Sartre later said he had always refused to equate the FLN’s bombs, “the only weapon available to the Algerians,” with the conduct of the French army. He signed the 1960 Manifesto of the 121, which justified Frenchmen who aided and sheltered the FLN, and his circle largely overlooked the FLN’s massacres and internal purges.
Sartre later applied the same logic to the terrorist group Black September’s murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He wrote that terrorism was the Palestinians’ “only weapon,” and that the French who had approved FLN terrorism against France must now approve Palestinian terrorism. He judged that the attack had succeeded perfectly in seizing the world’s attention.
Sartre’s redefinition of political violence as self-defense gave terrorism a license. He and other existentialist and postmodernist French and German philosophers prepared the world to call genuine self-defense, such as Israel’s war against Hamas, “genocide,” and to call Hamas’s massacres “resistance.”
Algiers: Where Red Met Green
If Sartre supplied the theory, Algeria supplied the model. The FLN’s 1962 victory became the blueprint for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, which adopted its cell structure, urban terrorism, cult of martyrdom, and pairing of armed struggle with UN diplomacy. Ahmed Ben Bella allowed Fatah to open its first foreign bureau in Algiers under Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), and Algeria trained and armed its early cadres.
Algerian leader Houari Boumediene went further. He pledged that Algeria stood with Palestine whether it was oppressor or oppressed, and he vouched for Fatah in Moscow. In 1974, with Algeria’s foreign minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika presiding over the UN General Assembly, Arafat delivered his “gun and olive branch” speech. In 1988, he proclaimed the State of Palestine in Algiers.
Algiers became a central meeting ground of the Red (socialist)-Green (Islamist) alliance: Soviet-backed Marxist Third Worldism joined an anti-Western cause that would increasingly wear Islamist colors. The Reds and the Greens hold different dogmas, but they share an enemy in the liberal West and a commitment to “revolution” or “resistance” against it.
Today, for a segment of France’s youth, many of North African descent and raised on the memory of the Algerian War, the Third Worldist syllogism has hardened into a worldview: France colonized, therefore France owes us, therefore what is taken from France, or burned, is restitution. The Marxist-led Black Lives Matter movement applied a similar radical CRT logic during the riots and looting that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020.
In the French case, the underlying grievances are real: the October 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris, discriminatory identity checks, and the isolated housing projects built for Algerian laborers. But Third Worldism has turned grievance into a weapon and a permanent moral exemption.
Third Worldism blames both the poverty of the developing world and the inequities of the West on colonialism and imperialism. It is the worldview of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America, and LFI in France. Once inequality is defined as colonial violence, Sartre’s boomerang follows: the “oppressed” become violent in resistance.
France’s Moral Confusion and Political Implosion
Colonial guilt, or repentance coloniale, is not official French doctrine. It is one of the country’s deepest fault lines. The left and LFI demand apologies, restitution, and a reckoning with crimes such as the 1961 massacre. The right rejects repentance as haine de soi, self-hatred, that teaches the children of immigrants to resent the Republic rather than join it.
Emmanuel Macron has tried to walk between the two camps. As a candidate in 2017, he stood in Algiers and called colonization a crime against humanity. As president, he acknowledged the army’s responsibility for the deaths of Maurice Audin and Ali Boumendjel, commissioning historian Benjamin Stora’s report on the Algerian War. He returned looted artifacts to Benin and Senegal, yet he has refused to issue a blanket national apology. Then, during his January 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Old City, he clashed with Israeli security officers at the Church of Saint Anne, angrily exclaiming, “It’s France here, and everyone knows the rule.” The 12th-century basilica, gifted to France in 1856, is treated under long-standing protocol as French territory, and local security forces are expected to yield to French guards at its entrance. Macron’s outburst echoed President Jacques Chirac’s at the same site in 1996.
In September 2025, France recognized a State of Palestine without a negotiated agreement, discarding the Oslo principle that statehood would emerge from bilateral talks, and it did so during a war that Hamas began.
France’s moral confusion is plain. In Algiers, its president condemns colonization while refusing to apologize for it; in Jerusalem, he insists on French prerogatives; at the UN, he grants statehood to a cause whose strongest faction carried out the October 7 massacre.
Albert Memmi, the Tunisian Jewish writer and pioneer of postcolonial thought, would have recognized this confusion. The author of The Colonizer and the Colonized, a book Sartre himself prefaced in 1957, knew what colonialism was and what it was not. As Susie Linfield has shown in Fathom, Memmi regarded Zionism as the national liberation movement of a people persecuted in Arab lands as well as in Europe, and he faulted the Left for condemning nationalism in Israel while excusing it in the Third World. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, he held newly independent states accountable for their authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and violence, and he dismissed “neocolonialism” as an alibi. Memmi knew who he was, a Jew rooted in his people’s heritage, and he knew that a free people answers for how it uses its freedom. France must relearn both lessons: what colonialism is and is not, and what France itself is, a Republic with a duty to defend its own society.
Repentance may not be state policy, but where it dominates the universities, activist networks, and LFI’s base, it becomes hard to tell young people that burning a town hall is a crime. Mass migration is changing Europe faster than its institutions can integrate newcomers. Integration requires a confident base culture. A culture that teaches its own history as an indictment offers resentment and an identity crisis.
Sartre’s boomerang has landed at home. A theory written in Paris to justify bombs in Algeria traveled through Algiers to the PLO, returned through French and American universities, and now burns French town halls. France can impose curfews and deploy 60,000 police. Still, it cannot restore order while much of its intellectual and political left concedes the radicals’ central premise: that the Republic is guilty.
