I don’t even have words for what’s going on in France right now. The skyline of Paris with tall columns of black smoke emerging in numerous places…it’s unimaginable.
YouTube Notes:
Chaos has broken out across France, spreading now to Belgium and Austria. Will this make its way across the English Channel? Well, there is plenty of reason to be concerned.
Landeur mini-bio:
In his videos, he’s stated:
- He did an undergraduate degree at Cambridge and won a scholarship.
- He was a Regular British Army officer for about seven years, left a couple of years ago, and was not a reservist.
- He has described the channel in lighter terms as a man who walks his dog and shares his thoughts (around the 100k-subscriber mark in 2025).
On identity (recent, 3 Oct 2026): “Arguing that “British” is not just a legal status under the British Nationality Act of 1981. If your definition of British is not ethnic, but legal, then you must surely accept that nobody was British prior to 1981. Ridiculous, and I really don’t care what the state has to say when it comes to issues of identity.”
On politics (3 Aug 2026): “I’m not interested in”‘center-right.” If you can’t bring yourself to say right wing, it shows that you are a coward. Britain doesn’t need any more cowards.”
I asked Grok to pull up some history, and why France has seen so much internal chaos over the years…
Grok: France has two overlapping habits that get lumped together as “they’re always burning things.”
- One is an old political culture in which street disruption is a normal way to bargain with the state.
- The other is a specific pattern of urban riots in the Banlieues that has repeated for about forty-five years, usually after a death during a police encounter, and that is heavily concentrated among the children and grandchildren of immigrant families in the poorest housing estates.
What is actually going on
The car-on-fire image is not an illusion. Burning vehicles became the ritual marker of banlieue riots in the 1980s, and never stopped. New Year’s Eve car burnings in some cities are now almost routine, outside any “protest.”The triggers are narrow and the locations are not random. The big waves cluster in zones urbaines sensibles with high concentrations of post-colonial immigrant families, high youth unemployment, and a long hostile relationship with police.
Billions have gone into the politique de la ville — on the order of €10 billion in 2023 alone by one French policy tally, and well over €100 billion since 2010 — without breaking the cycle. Each wave is larger in geographic reach than the last: local in the 1980s, ~300 towns in 2005, ~670 in 2023.
The political-protest side is older than immigration. French governments have repeatedly retreated after enough streets were blocked or enough windows broken, so disruption works as a tactic. The banlieue riots are different in who shows up and what they hit: not a demand that is negotiated and withdrawn, but a recurring attack on the nearest symbols of the state after a death, or sometimes after nothing more than a rumour.
The 2026 school unrest sits on the border of the two — an education grievance that began where the riot pattern already lives, and that slid into the same urban violence within days.