France is staring into the abyss

A 14-year-old pupil has been arrested after shooting a headteacher and a teacher at a school in southern France. On Monday, the suspect smuggled a hunting rifle inside a guitar case into the Joseph Lakanal school in Aubagne before opening fire. Mercifully, he was quickly subdued by a member of staff before he could shoot anyone else. The two injuries he inflicted were not life-threatening. The worst was avoided – but only narrowly. The investigation is now being handled by counter-terror police.

On the day of the attack, the authorities said there was no connection between this suspected attempted murder and the ‘school protests’ that have been setting much of France ablaze over the past few weeks. This may well be true in the narrow sense that the Joseph Lakanal school had not been impacted by the protests, but this feels like a category error.

Yes, the attack is unlikely to have been inspired by the same demands as the mass, thousands-strong marches organised by students’ unions and trade unions, as well as 1960s-style pupil ‘sit-ins’ against a litany of ills with the French education system. But, as I argued last week on spiked, it’s not clear that the recent violence and vandalism breaking out across France has ever had much to do with those grievances. Are the motorcycle convoys parading Palestinian flags really protesting against funding cuts? Are the groups of teens rapping to songs glorifying Islamist terrorism actually complaining about a shortage of substitute teachers? Are the masked rioters burning down school buildings attempting to send a message about the poor state of their classrooms? Of course not. Besides, now that these teenage uprisings have spread to Liège in Belgium, and Turin and Rome in Italy, we can surely dispense with the notion that French education policy is the real ill here.

So while the Aubagne shooting is also unlikely to be motivated by an earnest attempt to improve conditions in French schools, it does have something in common with the broader unrest – namely, that school staff were among those targeted. More than 40 school heads were injured between 18 September and 1 October, some in the most horrific of circumstances. The head of a vocational school in Auchel, northern France, had a lit firecracker thrown at him. In Marseille, the nearest major city to Aubagne, the head, deputy head and several other senior staff at the Victor Hugo high school were assaulted and doused in petrol, as rioters set fire to the school entrance.

Strikingly, French education minister Édouard Geffray has noted that most of the injured headteachers say they were set upon by teens who were not their own pupils. When a school is vandalised and set ablaze, this seems to invite other rioters intent on violence and destruction. In this context, it hardly seems implausible that the Aubagne shooting could have been an outgrowth of this lawlessness, a potentially fatal escalation from the scores of other attacks on school staff and property.

In the early hours of Monday morning, a fire totally destroyed the Marché des Enfants Rouges, Paris’s oldest covered food market, popular with locals and tourists alike. Investigations have only just begun and it is not currently being treated as suspicious, although it is certainly symbolic. More than 150 firemen and 50 fire engines were unable to save the 17th-century market from the blaze. Whether the fire was deliberate or accidental, the loss of this great monument feels of a piece with the broader unrest. The symbols of French civilisation – from its schools to its landmarks to its way of life – are burning to the ground.

France’s leaders are struggling to find an exit from this quagmire. French president Emmanuel Macron has appealed for restraint, but he is universally loathed on the street. His government has announced concessions, such as the hiring of 3,000 new substitute teachers, which the French state can ill afford and which won’t placate the mob anyway. The riots have hit France at a time of acute political polarisation, deadlock in parliament and a looming economic crisis. French debt levels are nearing 120 per cent of GDP, with government borrowing costs now surpassing those of Greece. The ‘bond vigilantes’ in the international money markets could soon do more damage than the masked vandals on the street.

France is not merely in flames – it is a nation staring into the abyss.