France Will Never Be Enough for the People Desecrating It

At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a national address to condemn the rioting and looting that convulsed France this weekend, from Brittany to Perpignan.

His suit and tie were black, instead of his customary navy blue, and he denounced the “seditionists from far-left fringe groups, joined by many criminals, engaged in unbridled violence in our cities.” He decried the grotesque destruction—crystallized in the viral image of a fire consuming the 19th-century wooden roof of the town hall in Limoges—and the methodical sacking of businesses.

“ Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse ,” he said : Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it.

Macron acknowledged legitimate concerns about education and the cost of living, distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters, and called for prosecutions while instructing prefects to consider banning mass gatherings.

It sounded good.

But as I was watching Macron live from New York, I called my children in Paris and heard the giddy chaos—the shouts and cheering—still vibrating through the streets below their open window.

They told me that some of the stores beneath their apartment were being ransacked as the president was speaking .

I had to push from my mind the appalling thought that these rioters might climb into the building’s residential upper levels.

Words aren’t enough anymore.

Slowly, the French authorities are starting to grasp that.

“The day of disorder and violence that we have just experienced in France is one day too many,” Bruno Le Maire, a former government minister under Macron, wrote on X on Saturday, when there were roughly 2,400 arrests and 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them grievously.

At least 3,000 businesses were damaged or looted over the weekend.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “localized” curfews in Paris and other cities across the country, which is a start.

Today, Lecornu added that the military would be deployed this weekend, when further protests are planned.