Muslims are rampaging through France

In what is clearly an existential war, will the French government fight back and, if it doesn’t, will the French people? Or, more importantly, can the French people?

Andrea Widburg | October 3, 2026

France’s urban areas have extremely large Muslim populations. I mean, extremely large. Now, those same populations are rampaging through the streets, attacking people, and setting buildings on fire. This is an existential problem for France, and it’s unclear whether the government will stop it and, if it doesn’t, whether the French people (mostly disarmed, of course) will step up to save themselves.

Let me take this step by step. First, how big is the urban Muslim population across France? Because France is an aggressively secular nation, it does not officially collect religious data, so the numbers are estimates and can be a little confusing, as they encompass both urban centers and the suburbs ringing those centers. Still, the data are useful. I asked ChatGPT to assemble the available data, which I present here. Please follow this link to see the caveats it attached to this data, and this link to see its source material.

Now, combine that data with reports of riots across France. This AP report gives a little background:

Thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, schools set on fire in France. When the summer vacation ended and the new term started just a month ago, few could have imagined that the academic year would so quickly descend into nationwide student protests — and turmoil.

In a country beset by crises — both foreign and domestic — the eruption and rapid spread of protests by unhappy teenage high schoolers caught France off guard.

Friday brought more of the scenes that have dominated streets this week: vandalism, garbage fires, teens confronting and taunting police. Officers charging, firing tear gas and making more arrests. By early afternoon, the education ministry reported protests impacting 560 schools.

Lest readers get upset, the AP hastens to assure them that (a) street protests are a common feature in France (that’s true) and (b) that the high school students have a level of professionalism, right down to masks and goggles to protect against tear gas.

Ostensibly, the protests are about bad schools:

High schoolers are expressing broad grievances — mainly, schools are under-resourced, with dilapidated facilities and insufficient staff. Still, spending on education is one of the costliest items in the state budget that Macron’s government proposed this week, with 65.5 billion euros ($74 billion) set aside for schools in the next year. That’s more than the proposed 63.4 billion euros for defense.

Students also complain that school days, which often start at 8 a.m., are too exhausting and the university entrance system too complex. Some university students also joined the protests this week.

Yeah, maybe. But footage on the ground suggests that the protesters aren’t students who want nicer buildings and better teachers. Instead, a lot of the footage suggests that the protesters are Muslim immigrants flexing their muscles:

Not coincidentally, the flags the protesters are flying aren’t French at all…

It’s ironic, really, that the French national anthem is La Marseillaise, named after the city in France with the largest percentage of Muslims and the most aggressive Palestinian…er, Muslim…er, student rioting.

As the AP report quoted above notes, the French police have been busy arresting the rioters. But I doubt the efficacy of that approach. I also doubt many, if any, will have serious jail time or any jail time at all. The left is allied with Islam, and the left fears Islam. That means Islam is in the driver’s seat.

Given an anticipated weak French response, will the French population act? Despite France’s periodically dismal war record since Napoleon’s downfall (despite some victories, it’s failed enough to be a standing joke), the French have been a warlike people, and darn good at it, too. Their generals have been awful, whether at Agincourt in 1415 or during WWI and WWII, but the French citizens used to be brave.

Are they still brave? And does bravery matter when you’ve voluntarily disarmed yourself in an orgy of virtue signaling, as all good citizens across Europe have done?

Currently, France has fewer than 12.7 million civilian-held firearms, compared to the 400 million or so in the U.S. Even adjusting for America’s larger population, that works out to ~120.5 firearms per 100 people in America, and only ~19.6 per hundred in France. Are they going to throw champagne bottles and frogs’ legs at rampaging “second- and third-generation migrants” who have a living culture of violence, rather than just a faded history of warfare?

Unrecognized at the time, Europe basically died in WWII. America kept it on life support for a long time, and it went through the motions of living. But once Europe embraced leftism and, through that, unlimited Islamic immigration, it began dismantling the very values that created it.

What’s happening now is tragic to watch, but it feels terribly inevitable. The European train is already halfway across a collapsing bridge stretched high over a bottomless abyss.

Image created using AI.

Related Topics: France, Protests, Islam

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Andrea Widburg

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