When I protested outside the Israeli embassy in Ljubljana a month ago, I had the chance to speak to someone from France who had joined the protest. What fascinated her most was how calm and non-violent our protests are. No cars set alight, no smashed shop windows, no clashes with the police. Smiling, she remarked that, where she comes from, a protest without all that is not a real protest. The French have rebellion against authority written into their history.
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Watching the scenes from France over the past few days brought that conversation back to me. Burning cars, smashed shop windows, looted shops, attacks on public buildings and clashes with the police. Scenes which, thankfully, are rare here. I’m glad that protests in Slovenia do not generally mean destroying cities and putting people’s lives at risk.
But why is France different?
The French have a long history of defying authority. In 1789, Parisians seized the Bastille, a symbol of royal arbitrariness, setting in motion one of the most recognisable events of the French Revolution. They did not simply burn the Bastille down: they captured it and later demolished it. This was followed by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the bloody Paris Commune of 1871, and the student protests of May 1968, which grew into mass workers’ strikes. In 2018, the Yellow Vests took to the streets over rising fuel prices, and the protests quickly expanded to encompass social inequality and the cost of living.
Time and again throughout history, French society has seen political change happen only when people occupied the streets in large numbers. That is why protests there are not merely an expression of discontent, but an important part of the country’s political culture. Of course, that does not mean all French protests are violent. Most people protest peacefully there too. But French history has been far more marked by barricades, clashes and violent state responses.
The state plays its part, too. The French police have a long tradition of fairly heavy-handed crowd control. Tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades are part of their response to protests. Such conduct can intensify public anger still further, creating a vicious circle of violence between the police and the most radical protesters.
What is happening today?
The current protests began in September 2026 among secondary school pupils, who drew attention to the shortage of teachers, poor conditions in schools and an uncertain future. The discontent quickly spread to questions of the cost of living, wages, pensions and cuts to public services. Trade unions, students and other citizens joined the protests.
On 17 October, around 550,000 people protested, according to the French Interior Ministry. Most did so peacefully. But smaller groups turned the protests into violent unrest. Limoges town hall was set on fire, while in other cities people smashed up shops, set cars alight and attacked police officers.
Who is actually responsible for the violence?
The fact is that the protests were not organised by violent people. Still less has anyone been proven to have planned all the violence. The protests have very concrete social causes, while violent groups exploited the events for their own ends. Investigations are still under way into who was responsible for individual acts.
We have seen something similar in Slovenia. Remember the violent protests in Ljubljana on 5 November 2020, when masked groups clashed with the police. The organisers of the Friday cycling protests publicly distanced themselves from that demonstration at the time. Yet the violent scenes still became part of the wider political debate about protests. And the right exploited them. How convenient, isn’t it?
That is precisely the danger. When someone joins a protest for better living conditions, higher wages or in opposition to war, a few hundred violent people can completely drown out the message of hundreds of thousands. Instead of talking about the reasons for the protests, we talk about burnt-out cars. Instead of citizens’ problems, we talk about smashed shop windows.
French protests have historical roots, but history cannot be an excuse for violence today. I understand resistance to authority, I understand discontent, and I understand people demanding change. But I do not understand how setting fire to the shop or car of someone with nothing to do with political decisions can contribute to a better society.
That is why, after that conversation outside the Israeli embassy, I am even more convinced that it is right for Slovenia to preserve a different protest culture. Loud, determined and persistent. But without destruction. Because the power of a protest lies not in the number of cars set alight, but in the number of people prepared to take to the streets and demand change.