The violence in France is being linked to a far-left political party that has drawn much of the country’s Muslim vote.
In Marseille, France, on October 2, a hooded 15-year-old burned a woman’s face with an aerosol can and a lighter at Place du 4-Septembre. She had tried to stop protesters from vandalizing a bus shelter. Police arrested the teenager that evening in the Frais-Vallon district after identifying him through video surveillance. He was charged with voluntary violence with three aggravating circumstances: using a weapon, acting as part of a group, and concealing his face. The prosecutor said, “No demand of any kind could justify such acts of violence.”
The attack was one incident in a wave of violence that has lasted about a week. The movement began in September at Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, where students protested a lack of teachers, nurses and supervisors, as well as overcrowded classrooms. The blockades spread from the Paris region to Marseille, Lille, Grenoble, Lyon and other cities.
On October 1, the Interior Ministry reported 1,949 arrests in a single day, mostly for attacks on public officials, violence and unlawful assembly. It also reported that 305 police and gendarmes had been injured. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned “unbridled violence.”
According to Public Sénat, 1,027 high schools were affected that day. It reported injuries to 65 education staff and 170 students, damage to more than 100 schools, and €7 million ($7.86 million) in damage in the Île-de-France region. On October 2, 564 schools were still disrupted.
In Bordeaux on September 29, a firefighter responding to a fire at a student barricade on Rue Sainte-Catherine, near the Lycée Montaigne, was engulfed in flames when an aerosol can in the fire exploded. He suffered burns to his legs. Authorities opened an investigation for arson causing serious injury. Video circulating on social media shows people at the scene filming and mocking him. The regional prefect said, “No demonstration can justify putting those who provide aid to the population in danger.”
In Paris, a trainee police lieutenant was chased and kicked by several people after being thrown to the ground. In Ingré, in the Loiret department, the principal of the Lycée Genevoix was punched in the face at the school entrance. The regional education authority filed a complaint.
In La Rochelle, rioters attacked a bus and threw Molotov cocktails. Eight people were taken into custody, and gatherings were banned around two schools.
The government has blamed the radical left. Nuñez said the blockades resemble urban violence more than a student protest. Education Minister Édouard Geffray accused elected officials of La France Insoumise (LFI) of exploiting the blockades for political ends. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused LFI of “irresponsible escalation.”
On September 28, LFI founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon posted on X: “Élus et militants insoumis interposez-vous partout où vous le pouvez” (“LFI elected officials and activists, put yourselves in the way wherever you can”). Lecornu responded, “The school of the Republic is not a partisan playground.” LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard called the government’s accusations “conspiracy thinking.”
An intelligence note from the Paris Police Prefecture, reported by Le Figaro, states that “the origins of the movement clearly reside in an instrumentalization of student union structures and political movements close to the far left.” The note says about 20 LFI national elected officials were involved in the movement in several cities on September 29. It also records the presence of activists from the Fédération syndicale étudiante (a student union), the far-left groups Le Poing levé and Révolution permanente, and LFI. The note itself has not been made public.
Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, was elected in March 2026. Speaking to BFMTV outside a Saint-Denis high school on September 29, in response to police firing flash-ball rounds at students, he said, “la violence peut être légitime, mais chaque fois qu’on peut l’éviter, c’est mieux” (“violence can be legitimate, but whenever it can be avoided, that’s better”). He stood by his remarks on October 1.
The outlet Frontières released video showing Bagayoko outside the Lycée Frédéric Bartholdi walking away from a burning trash bin, then dancing with the people who had set it on fire. Bagayoko called the accusations “grotesque” and said he tried to extinguish the fire. Footage released by the communist newspaper L’Humanité shows him moving the burning bin away from the school gate, dancing with students and applauding firefighters.
Seine-Saint-Denis, the department that includes Saint-Denis, has been a center of the unrest. According to INSEE, France’s national statistics agency, 32% of residents in the department are immigrants. In the city of Saint-Denis, 46,660 of its 148,907 residents, or 31.3%, were foreign nationals in 2022. Videos and photos from the protests show demonstrators carrying Algerian, Moroccan and Palestinian flags alongside signs demanding more teachers.
Mélenchon founded La France Insoumise in 2016, launching the movement “outside party frameworks” with backing from the French Communist Party (PCF). His political activity began decades earlier. In the 1970s, while a student at the University of Besançon, he was active in the Organisation communiste internationaliste (OCI), a Trotskyist group, before joining the Socialist Party in 1976. He left the Socialist Party in 2008, founded the Parti de gauche in 2009, and ran for office under the banner of the Front de gauche, an alliance with the PCF.
Denis Sieffert, interviewed by the French think tank IRIS, said Mélenchon’s foreign policy positions are “partly the Lambertist heritage,” a reference to Pierre Lambert, the leader of the OCI’s Trotskyist current.
The party’s electoral base includes a majority of France’s Muslim voters. According to the polling firm Ifop, 69% of Muslims voted for Mélenchon in the first round of the 2022 presidential election, and 62% voted for the LFI list in the 2024 European elections. In the same study, 83% of Muslim voters said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a deciding factor in their vote, compared with 25% of all voters.
In December 2025, a National Assembly commission of inquiry into links between political movements and Islamist networks concluded that LFI’s “clientelist strategy” toward Muslim voters had made it “a privileged target” for infiltration. The commission’s rapporteur, Matthieu Bloch, said the strategy led some LFI officials to show “signs of complacency, even active support for individuals close to Islamist movements.” LFI rejected the inquiry as “biased and partial” and said the testimony showed no evidence of collusion.
LFI holds 71 seats in the National Assembly. A September poll by Toluna Harris Interactive for M6 and RTL places its founder, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, second behind Le Pen in first-round voting intentions for the 2027 presidential election. Marine Le Pen is a leader of France’s right-wing National Rally party, known for supporting stricter immigration controls.
It appears that France’s next round of elections will determine whether the country continues down the path of socialist-Islamist-aligned destruction or elects a conservative government that will push back.
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