Who stands to gain from France’s unrest?

Part of Paris’s 3rd arrondissement, ground zero of the city’s bo-bo (bourgeois-bohemian) universe, had burned the night before under the banner of student protests. The black smoke from torched plastic garbage bins, rental bikes piled into barricades and street signs drifted into homes around 8 p.m., and its stench never really left.

Police tear-gas canisters traced such high arcs to reach protesters on the other side of the street that they flew past a sixth-floor window like sparrows. And while I was finishing a story about other people’s lives, a column of black smoke, like a Google Maps pin, marked the exact spot where he had parked his car. Though he would only discover that later.

Trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes, to decipher their joy or their suffering, does not always work. Life itself, even from the privileged position of still being alive and making it to the end of the month without major difficulties, provides more effective tools.

On Sunday morning, after the night of clashes, I set out to write a story about the damage caused by the unrest. How many unfortunate people, I wondered while thinking about where to have my first coffee, had had their cars burned? It turned out that I was one of them. At least I had removed the Elche football club pennant from the rear-view mirror. The rest was ashes.

On Sunday morning, there was a line outside the local police station: residents whose motorbikes, bicycles or cars had been set on fire. It felt like a spring picnic for those who had lost businesses that, in some cases, they had opened only weeks earlier with all the money they had. Inside, everything reeked of failure — social, cultural, identity-based, economic. In 2024, 15.4% of the population of metropolitan France was living below the poverty line, the highest figure since 1996, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).

Some people arrived covered in bruises after trying to defend one of the 3,000 shops looted across France. The police never showed up. Someone at the prefecture must have decided it was more important to rough up students. Now many shopkeepers believe that, next time, they will have to defend themselves. Throw punches.

In the waiting room sat lawyers who had been there for hours, representing some of the 2,500 people arrested across France. Many had been detained after breaking into hypermarkets, supermarkets and luxury stores the night before. “Louis Vuitton!” groups of masked youths had shouted, telegraphing their next destination. Dreaming costs nothing, but they ended up targeting mobile-phone shops and second-hand electronics stores like the one owned by Dhan, a Nepalese shopkeeper who could not even afford a cheap sheet of chipboard to cover the display window they had smashed. Try getting the insurance company to pay now.

Most people like to think they can keep certain instincts in check. But personal misfortune always flips a switch in the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex and whatever other parts of the brain that govern ideology. You see the world one way. Then something happens to you, you find yourself sitting in a waiting room that reeks of defeat, and everything takes on a different hue.

Jordan Bardella, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), is neither a neuropsychiatrist nor an expert on neural pathways. In fact, he never attended university and, as we learned two weeks ago, spent his final years in high school posting antisemitic messages in a Facebook chat group, according to Mediapart. But he understands better than anyone how that visceral mechanism that fuels hatred works.

On Sunday, he showed up at the very police station where I had spent three hours trying to file a report in the hope of recovering something from my car insurance. He was outside; we, the looters, the tourists, Dhan and I, were inside. He had come for one reason only: to tap into the public mood of anger.

“There is no longer any order in France. The country has been humiliated,” he declared.

And had it not been for Pouria Amirshahi, an Iranian-born lawmaker from the Green Party who showed up to derail his impromptu street rally live on camera, he might just have convinced us all.

“You’re a disgrace. You’re rubbing your hands with glee, aren’t you? I was out there with the shopkeepers. Where were you?”

“We work discreetly,” the far-right leader replied.

Which is exactly what I say on some Friday afternoons when people in Madrid ask how that Sunday feature is coming along.

The violence may subside in France in the coming days, though it is hardly an isolated phenomenon. Every time PSG or the national football team wins, cars and shops end up going up in flames. And this time, nobody was killed — a miracle, according to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

Some victims may eventually recover part of their losses from insurance companies, after hours on the phone, endless claims and a considerable waste of time. But the anger and disillusionment will keep growing. And as that emotional shift unfolds, two parties, La France Insoumise and the National Rally, sitting comfortably at opposite ends of the spectrum and currently leading the race to reach the second round of the presidential election, will profit from it more than anyone else.

As Amirshahi put it, they are already rubbing their hands.

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