Communists are marching on Paris.

Weekend after weekend. Traipsing the wreckage of civilisation with them. Smashing. Stealing. Revelling in the barbaric thrill found in the swing of a baseball bat against a department store window.

It is the same brand of satisfaction felt by the Islamic State when its militants tore down Palmyra, jealous of the shadow it cast over their regime.

In France, after the historic buildings have burned, who pays the billion-euro bill?

We have an answer.

The new Riot Tax makes it sound like accountability for rioters. It is not. A 0.8 per cent levy has been approved on home, vehicle, and business insurance policies beginning January 1, 2027. This solidarity contribution is advertised as being ‘paid by insurers’ but will almost certainly be passed on to the victims. Going forward, Riot Cover will be compulsory. The cost of doing business in France? A nightmare.

Meanwhile, rioters took their designer loot home and started flogging it online. Modern communism: redistributing stolen goods in exchange for capital. Or maybe it was always that way … when the farms were captured and people’s homes dismantled for the enrichment of collective leadership.

Scroll through social media. You will find the hammer and sickle fluttering proudly amongst Palestinian flags (sometimes with the hammer replaced with a fork to ‘eat the rich’).

It is a sight to make the Enlightenment weep.

And a wholly predictable conclusion to Germany’s wir schaffen das pledge to one million asylum seekers.

Europe has since drowned under more than 12 million illegal migrants and economic refugees. 1.5 million of them made it to France. Most from dictatorial and collectivist regimes whose influence reinforces the radicalisation of French students who have fallen victim to intellectual nonsense.

Despite the spawn of collectivism (socialism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, fascism, and National Socialism) tearing Europe apart last century, the majority of Europe’s nations are led by socialists.

It is claimed by some that fear of the Right rising to power democratically led various nations to use migration as a deliberate electoral strategy to wash out ‘nationalistic tendencies’, dressing conservative opposition as the shadow of Hitler instead of admitting that over-generous welfare systems ate away at Europe’s economic prosperity.

European decline started with a failure of Leftism before its leaders, quite literally, swept their failures under a pile of hostile migrants and tried to pass national debt off as a selfless global burden rather than self-inflicted disaster.

Now, for the lesson: a nation with no borders is a ship without an anchor. And Europe drifts as a collection of unmoored vessels grinding against each other in choppy water.

Instead of facing austerity measures to fix budget mistakes, the next generation of leaders will have to contend with Islamism, violent Left-wing radicals, and Populism.

As for the Left-wing masterminds, they never learn.

They fail to acknowledge the corpses of Iranian university students or grasp that France is a nation where Left-wing cartoonists were massacred by Islamists. And after a few hours of Woke gaslighting, the press blamed the victims. How dare the satirists offend! Mass-murder became an argument for blasphemy laws. Islamic groups pressured the paper for years until the French lost their nerve and liberty died. This is France as it is, not as legend pretends.

The soft power of radical Islam over the French Republic has become hard power.

Islamic terror attacks at the Bataclan theatre, Stade de France, and local cafes killed 130. The slaughter was followed by truck and car attacks, stabbings, and church attacks. Priests and religious figures had their throats slit while a foreign national almost beheaded a woman next to Holy Water.

France’s institutions, especially schools, have struggled to defend their revolutionary ‘ideals’ without the glue of faith to ward against fear.

Students ask why there is a teacher shortage in France. Well, a middle school teacher near Paris was beheaded by a student over satirical cartoons during a lesson on freedom of expression. Another teacher was stabbed to death in an act of terrorism. Perhaps rioting students should spend some time in reflection about their own behaviour.

It is worth observing that some genuine French students taking part in the riots felt nothing. They were filmed stepping over sobbing store owners – arms full of loot. Their unmasked faces were caught in gleeful expressions. Some danced. Others shouted at reporters. These are the empathetic Left. People incapable of feeling anything when the terror is inflicted by their own hands. It says their empathy is performative. It is political. It is manipulative.

They went on screen and told the world, who cares if some people lost everything when they want something? This is the curse of Marxist oppressor narratives. It rationalises cruelty in the minds of the self-described oppressed. They can steal, burn, and kill if you have something they feel entitled to.

New footage emerged yesterday of foreign-born students justifying their desire to ‘burn the country to the ground’ because ‘French people’ are at ‘the top’ of the system. And while you might say, well obviously French people are at the top of their own country, the Left nod along with open insurrection.

Evidently none of them are farmers. As they will teach, you burn the grass to enrich the soil. You don’t burn the oaks, the ancient forests, or the bowers that have spent millennia weaving a protective canopy.

All the radicals see is kindling.

Our forests of knowledge are their bonfire.

If you listen to Left-wing propaganda, because 45,000 people were slaughtered during (and shortly after) the French Revolution – 17,000 losing their heads to the guillotine, 20,000 without trial – that historical act of blood lust somehow justifies an eternal culture of rioting, looting, burning, and violence amongst the French youth.

It’s just how the French force political change.

The French should be ashamed of their bloody past, but instead the surviving socialists washed their hands of the gore by fashioning political malice into a fictional narrative of ‘liberation’. It is a delusion that lives on in their universities and infects other Western institutions. Teaching young people that they can use violence, intimidation, and destruction to achieve political goals is an extremely bad idea. It’s the Grand Theft Auto of democracy.

Despite this, the spirit of ‘revolution’ has circulated through the French psyche with all the intellectual honesty of Italians lusting after Russell Crowe’s ‘are you not entertained?!’ line from Gladiator. Modern Italians are not about to butcher their prisoners for sport in the Colosseum and nor were the French inclined to burn their châteaux when Macron could easily be deposed at an election.

The majority of ethnically French people remain democratic, which could explain why it’s difficult to pick them out from the crowds smashing fountains, burning buildings, or running down the high street with loot. Macron’s government has since accused foreign radicals and extreme left-wing groups for misusing the narrative of the French Revolution to incite the plunder of France.

For these criminal elements, the benefit of involving a handful of real, brainwashed students is obvious: any police action taken against genuine acts of violence and damage can be re-branded on social media as ‘fascism’ and ‘attacks against the poor little kids who just want school books’.

It is true that one bookshop was looted … of everything except its books.

As with the previous radicalised leftist riots in the West, the more time passes, the more curated and bastardised the official narrative becomes. We are being treated to every absurdity – from the French leadership blaming AI to a digital army of influencers, state media, mainstream media, politicians, useful idiots, and bots all making adjustments to what we saw with our own eyes. Before the year is out, who will remember a handful of French people collapsed in front of the ashes of their country?

Instead, it is my view that we adopt a zero-tolerance of their narrative. These are not student protests. Their grievances are not valid. This is another ‘mostly peaceful’ BLM-esque riot, another fake climate apocalypse, another version of endless left-wing radicalisation pushed by groups who seek only one thing – system collapse.

The French Revolution was meant to be a warning about what not to do.

France’s leadership is famous for raising the white flag and yet its intelligentsia revisits the bones of this despotic orgy like a dog lifts its leg to the same corner of the sofa.

Whether habit, dogma, or internalised shame, the French socialists never repented for crimes against ordinary French people. Rather, they crowned Napoleon after Napoleon after Napoleon until their faux kings became emperors and the story of liberty was reduced to an endless cycle of failed republics (of which this is the Fifth).

When rioters surrounded the Louvre some wondered how long it would be before these new revolutionaries set the Mona Lisa to flame with the same mania as those who herded the Martyrs of Compiègne to the guillotine.

Beneath all this is a simple truth: the civil problems of people should be solved democratically, while the civilisational problems of invasion and attack are solved with expulsion and war.

In this age, the lines between civil and civilisation have bled together through the porous nature of a borderless world. Nations are becoming clusters of assets without protection. We are living through the next ‘terror’ of civil war at the command of far-away kings and religious leaders.

It is hard to determine if there has ever been a time in which so many empires of the world have been eaten from within with no ability to envision a defence. For the Enlightenment, this is a crisis of thought. While many of our nations are headed in this direction, the French, who like to play with revolutionary matches, sparked their ‘terror’ early so we may avoid ours.

Australians have been forewarned. Our buildings are unburned. Our shops are intact. And our kids are not yet beyond salvation.

If we fail to protect our nation, the least-prepared and worst-educated generation for centuries will be set out onto the street to negotiate their future with thieves and criminals for a life lived under the shadow of some as yet unknown tyrant.

The communists bring revolution and terror. We must demand the restoration of the West.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

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