French Riots, Russian Playbook

In late summer 1944, as the Allies clawed France back from Nazi occupation, Adolf Hitler is reported to have asked one of his generals, “Is Paris burning?”

The führer’s question was more of a demand; Hitler wanted to deploy scorched-earth tactics in the French capital to slow the Anglo-American advance.

Fortunately, the German dictator’s underlings punted and Paris was spared. Today, however, Paris is in flames, along with several other French cities. Rioters have torched cars and buildings and smashed homes and storefronts. Like Hitler before him, Vladimir Putin needs the West ablaze in order to postpone military defeat.

With Russia, nothing comes out of the blue. The timing—coinciding with Donald Trump’s final, complete betrayal of Ukraine, ahead of the November US midterms and presidential elections in France next spring—is no accident.

Everything is telegraphed, and the Kremlin’s hand is plainly visible in the chaos for all those willing to see. Here is Putin’s playbook:

A viral TikTok from an anonymous account calls people out into the streets. Russian-run imposter profiles amplify fake news stories, like an “AFP” headline about a papal visit cut short because of the riots. Then officials in Moscow and Russian regime apparatchiks and state media outlets do a victory lap, citing the images from France as evidence of a failing, degenerate West.

As one Russian government spokesman said, “The West has fallen because of an inability to discuss and correct consequential mistakes on migration, energy, and warmongering.” The latter two points—“energy” and “warmongering”—are clear jabs at Ukraine.

Marine Le Pen—Putin’s favorite French politician—could not have asked for a better campaign ad (perhaps she did ask). Over the weekend, videos circulated of the historic bell tower crumpling into Limoges City Hall’s burning roof after rioters set the building aflame. Those clips will be reproduced millions of times, not just in France, but in every Western democracy.

“This is what you get with the left,” the inevitable captions will read, “This is the failure of the multicultural project. This is a West that spends more on migrants and Ukrainians than it does on you. This disintegrating bell tower is your disintegrating society.”

The Far Left are as much Putin’s accomplices as the Far Right. On Sunday, France’s top leftist politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, declared that “the real culprits [in the riots] are in the government”—the kind of comment you’d expect from RT or TASS. Unsurprisingly, he is anti-NATO, and anti-EU. Mélenchon blames Ukraine for Russia’s aggression just as he blames French authorities for the behavior of arsonists and looters.

It is clear that the only ones who benefit from this mess are Putin and his chosen puppets. Yet myopic mainstream media outlets cover this insurrection as if it is normal, taking the nominal spark (“student protests”) at face value. A New York Times writeup on the French Far Right’s response to the riots makes no mention of Le Pen’s longstanding Kremlin connections.

Russia has already conquered the White House. Now, Vladimir Putin has set his sights on the Élysée Palace and the federal chancellery in Berlin. Yet such crude interventions in European and American politics are also a sign of Russian weakness. Putin is worried about the midterms and what comes next. The Russian tyrant cannot beat Ukraine on the battlefield, so he resorts to KGB mind games with impressionable Western publics. We—the liberal, democratic West—can win, but if we want to thwart Putin, then we have to be willing to recognize the kind of game he is playing.