Riots in France are not what they appear to be in the media. What is really going on in France?

The radical network driving the disorder in France.

Published in The Free Press by Nora Bussigny

What began as a high school protest movement spiraled into a violent uprising, organized by Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists who wish to see the French Republic toppled.

In the immediate wake of the violent protests in France over the weekend, the overriding reaction was shock. 

And understandably so: Shopkeepers saw their livelihoods destroyed overnight; innocent bystanders were threatened by protesters; iconic symbols of the French Republic were toppled and burned with impunity; and one of the great nations of the West seemed, all at once, to teeter on the brink of collapse.

But amid all the destruction, one question has gone largely unanswered: Who really organized these protests❓

If you believe it was simply high school students fed up with teacher shortages and poor classrooms, you would be sorely mistaken. Rather, “the protests of October 17—and the ones planned for this coming weekend,” writes French investigative journalist Nora Bussigny, “were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists.”

Nora spent more than a year undercover in France’s anti-Israel movement, and today, she walks us through the messages, posts, and funding streams that reveal the radical network behind the protests—a red-green alliance that’s become increasingly familiar across the West in recent years. “What we are seeing in France is only a symptom of a much larger problem,” she writes. And if we hope to stop its spread, “it must be identified and called out for what it is.”

Chaos took hold of France this past weekend, as rioters stormed the streets, smashed buildings, set cars and a city hall in Limoges on fire, and looted stores across the country. It was the violent explosion of a protest movement that began in late September, with high school students angry about poor school conditions and a teacher shortage, and ended on the morning of October 18, with the streets covered in charred cars and broken glass.

You might think that Saturday’s chaos was orchestrated by the same students who started the protests. But, you would be wrong. The October 17 protests—and the ones planned for this coming weekend—were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists. They share a precise project: the rejection of France’s democratic institutions, and a desire to destabilize those institutions and cause the Republic to topple.

This coalition may sound familiar to readers across the West. The red-green alliance—the convergence of radical leftists with political Islamists, brought together by their shared opposition to Western values and institutions—has become increasingly difficult to ignore, rearing its head from England to Germany to college campuses across the U.S. 

In other words, what we are seeing in France is only a symptom of a much larger problem. It must be identified and called out for what it is.

To do that, we need only trace the messages and images these French groups have posted publicly over the past few weeks. For example: The day before October 17, the radical-left news site Contre Attaque published the precise addresses of several French newsrooms, which it then circulated to its more than 400,000 Instagram followers. Included on the list were right-wing outlets as well as public broadcasting sources. “On October 17, what if the channels of enemy propaganda were unplugged?” the activist news site suggested. It even offered advice: “In the capital, it’s extremely simple: The headquarters of almost all media outlets are concentrated in a few streets in the same neighborhood; they are accessible, and vulnerable.” At 7 a.m. on October 17, the order took effect: Around a hundred people—“hooded,” according to police—stormed the headquarters of CNews, one of the outlets on the list.

Radical-left groups were involved even at the very beginnings of the high school protest movement in late September. They include the Jeune Garde Antifasciste (Antifascist Young Guard), which was dissolved in 2025, due to its incitement of violent confrontation, but is still operating underground, and Génération Espoir Dignité Résistance—which is facing dissolution by the French government for its ties to the Jeune Garde Antifasciste. Génération Espoir Dignité Résistance was founded by the leaders of the Jeune Garde as well as those of three other activist organizations: the radical-left political collective RED Jeunes, the high school student union Union Syndicale Lycéenne, and Étudiants Musulmans de France (Muslim Students of France). Étudiants Musulmans de France is the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in France, as confirmed by a 2025 government report on the extent of the Muslim Brotherhood’s presence in France.

For several years, Étudiants Musulmans de France has been setting up chapters in universities across France. These chapters decided to join the high school movement, with the aim of inserting the fight against “Islamophobia” into the middle of demands about the shortage of teachers and the dilapidated state of schools. They encouraged the protesters to rise up against laïcité, France’s principle of secularism. In their sights are the 2004, law banning religious symbols (including the hijab) in schools, and former prime minister Gabriel Attal’s 2023 ban on wearing the abaya in state schools.

One of the main faces of the movement is Soumaya Sarré, a Muslim activist student with RED Jeunes and a supporter of the far-left party, La France Insoumise. Sarré has been a leader of the high school protests, posting videos to her Instagram encouraging students to get organized: “The more of us there are, the more united we are, the less they’ll be able to bring us down.” On September 29, Sarré fumed against French president Emmanuel Macron, explicitly connecting the protests to the French government’s ban on the hijab and abaya in public schools: “Yo Macron, you’re out of line. You get to school, they tell you to take off your veil, we didn’t say a word. You wear a long dress, they say it’s an abaya, they send you home, we didn’t say a word. Now you ask for a teacher in front of you, a decent classroom to have class in, and they send the police when you mobilize! So when it’s about imposing a way of dressing on you, the state is quick to act, but when it’s about having normal conditions for education, there’s nobody there anymore.”

On October 1, the Belfort chapter of Étudiants Musulmans de France campaigned alongside the high schoolers, and posted an image of the gathering to its Instagram story. In the following days, calls to converge the protests into a grand uprising on October 17 followed one after another, as the Muslim Brotherhood–linked organization’s Instagram page attests.

The high school protests that paved the way for the October 17 attacks were also helped by extremely well-organized pro-Palestinian collectives. I know these groups well, having spent more than a year undercover in France’s anti-Israel movement.

First, Urgence Palestine. This radical-left collective, which marches with flags of the Iranian regime, is in the process of being dissolved by the French government. Its two figureheads are the preacher Elias d’Imzalène and the violent activist Omar Alsoumi. 

After the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, both spoke at protests, calling for the violence to continue. D’Imzalène called to “start an intifada in Paris,” was convicted of incitement to hatred, and has since appealed the ruling. Alsoumi called to spread “an Al-Aqsa Flood,” and will stand trial in December.

Very early in the high school protests, Urgence Palestine called for its followers to join the students at the sites where their schools were being blockaded. Leading up to October 17, it posted a message calling people to rally together to fight “against police violence, against colonial violence, against France’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine.”

On October 14, Urgence Palestine posted a video of Sarré speaking at a rally. “From Gaza to France’s high schools, youth rises up and refuses to be silenced,” read the caption. “We’ve seen it, the high school mobilizations are making a lot of noise,” Sarré says in the video. “And at every protest, if you’ve been paying attention, you can see Palestinian flags, you can see keffiyehs wrapped around the heads of these young high schoolers. For me, that’s already a sign of resistance that isn’t weakening. Quite the opposite!”

Urgence Palestine is also closely tied to Samidoun—the two publicly support each other and frequently collaborate on protests and advocacy—which has been designated a terrorist organization in several countries, including the United States, for serving as the charitable front of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Samidoun has chosen to use the same victim narrative to speak about Palestinian terrorists held in Israel as it does about French protesters. On October 12, the organization published a lengthy statement on its Telegram channel and relayed it on its website, in which it revisits the real or alleged police violence against young protesters, then draws the link: “This repression is, moreover, not unrelated to the brutality exercised by the Zionist colonial entity toward the Palestinian population, which illustrates the colonial continuum at work.” It then calls, in turn, for support for “the resistance of youth,” for “Generation Gaza,” and above all for “the student intifada that loudly refuses to witness a genocide on livestream.”

On the ground alongside them is Palestine Action, designated as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom. Palestine Action France actively relayed calls to protest on October 17 on its Instagram story—specifically celebrating a demonstration that same day in Marseille against “Eurolinks,” an arms factory accused of “complicity with Israel.”

The coalition behind the protests includes another reliable ally: radical environmentalists. On October 13, activist Greta Thunberg traveled to Saint-Denis, the stronghold of the high school mobilization in the suburbs, to support the students. Right afterward, in a video while wearing a keffiyeh (scarf), she called for people to join the October 17 mobilizations, urging them to show solidarity with the students and connecting the protests to efforts against climate change and social injustice.

The radical environmentalist collectives answered the call. Extinction Rebellion, for example—a group in the crosshairs of the French and British governments for actions promoting “civil disobedience”—put a yellow vest on the statue of Marianne at Place de la République during the October 17 protests. The vest bore the words “The police are maiming high schoolers.”

The radical environmentalist network Les Soulèvements de la Terre also took part in the protest, and is now already calling for round two. “After a month of the high school movement’s rising power,” the message decrees, “the October 17 day of action against the high cost of living was a historic moment of convergence and uprising. Let us support those charged after October 17. . . let us continue the ongoing revolt.”  

These organizations can count on a group of influencers to amplify their messages and keep their online followers angry. 

One notable example is Shahin Hazamy, a radical-left activist who was convicted last September of glorifying terrorism over October 7—a charge he has appealed. At his trial, the prosecutors revealed that he has repeatedly posted and circulated messages from the Islamic Republic to his 200,000 followers. Hazamy also holds an Iranian press card and presents himself as a journalist. He has never hidden his ties to the regime from his followers, nor his trips back and forth to the country.