French demonstrations revive old debates over revolutionary violence

French demonstrations over recent weeks have pushed the radical-left party La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to revive a controversial political argument. The ideology posits that democratic societies contain an invisible, systemic form of violence, granting citizens the right to counter it with the visible and open violence of rioters, as nrc.nl reported.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent philosopher, journalist, and filmmaker, traced this intellectual lineage back through modern history. Jean-Paul Sartre famously framed the murder of colonizers in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s anticolonialist text The Wretched of the Earth as a necessary response to systemic oppression. Later, in a 1977 article for The World titled “Violence et brutalité,” Jean Genet presented the terrorism of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group as an inevitable byproduct of anti-imperialist struggle. Georges Sorel similarly argued at the beginning of the twentieth century in Reflections on violence that proletarian violence possessed a healing power against the bourgeois state.

The Vulnerable Bear the Cost of Protest

The primary consequence of this counter-violence is that it rarely targets the apparatus of the state. Instead, it impacts the most economically vulnerable citizens in French society.

A police officer working night shifts for roughly 2,000 euros a month finds themselves protecting property and public demonstration rights at personal risk. Shopkeepers relying on Saturday sales watch their capital vanish as storefronts face looting. Car owners who struggle to pay for fuel suddenly confront steep repair bills or the bureaucratic hurdles of insurance claims. While riots present themselves as a direct strike against the system, they primarily terrorize workers who reap none of its major rewards.

Historical Precedents of Failed Revolutions

History demonstrates that revolutionary violence rarely halts systemic oppression; instead, it provides a catalyst for wider devastation. The Lyon silk weavers’ revolt of 1834 ended when soldiers opened fire on the crowds. The June Days uprising of 1848 met a similarly bloody end, while the Paris Commune was crushed at the cost of thousands of lives.

When uprisings actually succeed, the resulting regimes frequently prove more oppressive than the governments they replaced. Liberation violence does not end domination; it merely transfers power into harsher hands. The philosophical choice remains the one outlined by social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: surrender the right to individual vengeance in exchange for a state monopoly on force, or descend into a jungle where only raw power rules.

The Rule of Law as the Sole Safeguard

Abandoning institutional order risks fracturing society into warring factions. The alternative to a functioning legal framework is a lawless environment where individuals act as self-appointed judges, potentially sparking civil conflicts between polarized political extremes.

Intellectual figures eventually recognized the dead end of this ideology. Sartre distanced himself from terror-based worldviews in conversations with Benny Lévy near the end of his life, just as Genet’s later writings revealed a troubling fascination with his youth alongside Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. The defense of civilization relies not on the chaos of riots, but on the mechanisms of the rule of law. Justice provides citizens with a structured method to hold power accountable without collapsing into vigilante justice or dictatorship.

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