Summary: Gatestone’s Guy Millière reports that the France riots entered a fourth weekend on 7 November. He cites more than 3,000 shops looted or destroyed and 2,000-plus police wounded since 17 October. By his count, almost all of the nearly 5,000 rioters arrested were released within hours. He writes that police have been ordered not to harm rioters, shopkeepers are being told to hire private guards, and gun sales are up tenfold. He adds that public debt exceeds €3.6 trillion, Macron’s favourable rating is 13%, and unrest has also flared in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Greece.
Why it matters: This is what a liberal order looks like when its rulers stop listening: a state that cannot protect shopkeepers, courts that free rioters within hours, and a president who claims the viral footage was AI-generated presiding over citizens who are buying guns. Western Europe is showing the world, in real time, that no civilisation holds a birthright to superiority and no one system of government is right everywhere, everytime. What holds a country together is accountable, rooted, pragmatic leadership that serves the people in front of it, not ideological dogma or virtue-signalling. Bharat, lectured for decades by these same capitals on democracy, secularism and minority rights, can take note.
“Is It Too Late to Save France?” — Gatestone Institute, 8 Nov 2026
November 7. Riots are still erupting in France's major cities, the fourth weekend in a row, perhaps only slightly less destructive than before. On October 19, the government imposed a curfew in many cities, then sent in police and water cannons. More than 3,000 shops — including several supermarkets — have been looted or destroyed. Stores that survived had boarded up their doors and windows, transforming the centers of Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities into bleak, barren ghost towns.
The police, now mobilized to the limit, cannot indefinitely sustain this level of deployment. Their numbers are not unlimited, and individual officers cannot remain on duty without sleep. Police officers also cannot be expected to endure increasingly extreme violence. Since October 17, more than 2,000 officers have been wounded — some severely — and the numbers continue to rise…
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