The ongoing protests in France ramped up Tuesday. Thousands of people took to the streets, the Eiffel Tower was closed, and the French government warned that the protesters wanted “to destroy, to injure and to kill.” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin took the unprecedented step of putting 13,000 officers in place to face the protesters, with almost half in Paris alone. This has been going on for almost two weeks now, and shows no signs of letting up anytime soon. Some Americans have laughed at the French, because the source of the nationwide rage is President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. All the unrest over having to work longer? How quintessentially French. But what the French protests really show is the failure of the welfare state. It’s a lesson that Americans would do well to learn.
Macron is aping the Leftist overlords throughout the ages, pushing austerity on his people while having no intention of tightening his own belt. He drew international ridicule Friday for putting his hands under the table during a televised discussion and surreptitiously taking off a luxury watch, the estimated worth of which could be as high as $86,000, while talking about how the French people were going to have to make sacrifices.
In France, however, the hypocrisy of the elites is just one small aspect of a much larger problem with the welfare state in general. A 2016 study ranked France’s welfare system as the most generous in the world, and that system has not changed significantly since then. “France’s social security deficit was approximately $22 billion in 2012,” said the study, and as you’d expect, that problem has not been solved but has only gotten worse.
As more and more people in France went on the dole, Reuters reported in September 2020 that “France’s social security deficit will reach record levels this year,” and was set to reach 44 billion euros ($51.4 billion) that year, “far more than the deficit of 5.4 billion forecast last year [2019] by the government.” This is because of the government’s record-breaking profligacy. The 2016 study notes that France “has the most generous social welfare spending, which amounts for 31.5% of its GDP.” The system is now cracking under the strain of paying all this money for so many people not to work, and that’s why Macron is having to raise the retirement age?
Why doesn’t Macron reform the welfare system instead? To do so would almost certainly destroy him politically. But why does France need this massively generous system in the first place? The answer involves another topic that few among the French political elites have the courage to face. A 2016 Brookings study noted that while 15% of native French fifteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds were unemployed, fully forty percent of migrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Turkey of that age were jobless. Yet these were the people who were brought into the country to serve as a workforce as the native French population, which had stopped reproducing, aged and retired. Of all the groups in France, they should have the lowest unemployment rate of all, not the highest.
Yet Brookings observed that “recent immigrants and their descendants tend to concentrate in public housing projects that were built in the 1960s and 1970s in low-rent neighborhoods; in France, these projects are located on the urban outskirts, known as banlieues or cités.” These areas are predominantly Muslim: “the proportion of residents of North African origin may be very high, but it is never all inclusive; other Africans, Turks, and nonimmigrant French live alongside Arabs and Berbers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.” And “these neighborhoods are marked by poverty” and “welfare dependence.”
It also must be noted that non-Muslims paying for the upkeep of Muslims is a Qur’anic dictate, as the Islamic holy book commands Muslims to fight against Jews and Christians “until they pay the jizya [a poll tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). The caliph Umar said the payments from the non-Muslims who were subjugated under Muslim rule (dhimmis) were the source of the Muslims’ livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s Convention (made with the Dhimmis) as it is the convention of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents (i.e. the taxes from the Dhimmis)’” (Bukhari 4.53.388). UK jihad preacher Anjem Choudary said in February 2013, “We are on Jihad Seekers Allowance, We take the Jizya (protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims) which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the Kafir (non-Muslim), isn’t it? So this is normal situation. They give us the money. You work, give us the money.” Are all Muslims in France sitting back and expecting the state to pay their bills? Of course not. But the unemployment figures demonstrate that the problem with France’s welfare system is also largely a problem of its mass migration policies.
Related: French Pension Reform Protests Are Growing Bigger and More Violent as Macron Remains Silent
And so now the gravy train is running dry, and France is aflame. The protests are enormous and destructive. CNN reported Friday that “More than a million people took to the streets across France on Thursday with protests turning violent in some areas. … French police said around 1,000 people acted ‘violently,’ setting fires, launching smoke bombs and damaging property. In the southwestern city of Bordeaux, protesters set fire to the entrance of the city hall during ongoing clashes with police.” In light of this, it must be asked about the entire enterprise of bringing massive numbers of migrants into France, many of whom depend on a welfare system that is now staggering under the strain: was it worth it?
The classic 1966 movie Is Paris Burning? centers around Adolf Hitler’s desire, as the Allied armies advance through France in 1944, to see Paris destroyed rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. Paris didn’t burn in 1944, but as it turns out, the conflagration was just delayed. CNN added Friday that “Paris and most major cities – including Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and Rennes – have been hit by protests.” Hitler is finally getting his wish.
Will Americans learn the lessons of this unrest? Almost certainly not. But one day we will have to face the same problems ourselves.
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