by Brendan O’Neill, spiked (Photo: Unsplash)
Saturday’s violent desecration of the French Republic was a mob jihad against democracy itself.
I’m old enough to remember when we called it ‘conquest’ when a mob of masked men stormed a town hall or a parliament building to raise the flag of a foreign nation. I can recall a time when the violent invasion of a nation’s high seats of civic power by a faceless swarm draped in the standard of a distant land was considered an act of brazen, treasonous hostility. So why do so many insist on referring to the thuggish usurping of the streets of Paris and beyond by gangs flying the Palestine flag as a ‘protest’?
The scenes from France on Saturday were apocalyptic. Even in a nation famous for its street-fighting, the scale of destruction was wild. Across the capital, entire boulevards were reduced to smouldering, ash-choked wastelands of incinerated vehicles, blown-out storefronts and acrid clouds of tear gas. There were running battles between the thugs and the cops, the former armed with jagged chunks of pavement, the latter with truncheons and gas. Even the city’s leftie custodians were forced to break script and admit the truth. Socialist mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said vast swathes of Paris had been ‘devastated’. His deputy, Lamia El Aaraje, said it was destruction of the like we’ve ‘never seen before’.
It was the sight of the beautiful town hall of Limoges being devoured by fire that really shook France, and the world. A palatial citadel of public life, it was built in 1883 and made a protected monument in 1975. On Saturday, a mob set fire to a cop car outside the town hall, then smashed the hall’s windows, clambered in, and set fires with cruel abandon. The flames licked upwards and engulfed the roof, causing it to cave in. The bell tower came crashing down. As many have pointed out, it survived two world wars but it could not survive the unleashed juvenile rage of ‘the New France’.
For me, even more disturbing than the mob’s desecrations in Limoges was their brutish shoving aside of Marianne in Marseille. Masked gangs stormed into the city hall there. They cried ‘It’s the revolution!’ before hurling a bust of Marianne to the cold, stone floor. Marianne, of course, is the female personification of the French Republic, the proud-busted woman who embodies liberty, equality, fraternity and the rule of reason. It was less violent than the architectural nihilism in Limoges but more telling: we are witnessing nothing short of a mob jihad against the French Republic.