France could be on the brink of civil war

they've got an immigration timebomb ticking

France could be on the brink of civil war



Two years ago, after yet another couple of nights of rioting in the banlieues, twenty retired French generals wrote an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, then about to run for a second term, warning that the divisions between communities and increasing “violence and nihilism” in France would eventually cause a social breakdown, with a risk of “chaos” leading to a “civil war” that would then “require” a military “intervention… in a dangerous mission to protect our civilisational values and safeguard our compatriots”.

Strong stuff, co-signed by some 100 senior officers and about a thousand other members of the military, in a country where the Army is known as “the Great Mute”, i.e. never expressing a preference in national politics. In the one instance, during the Algerian independence war, when four generals attempted a putsch against President Charles de Gaulle on April 21, 1961 to protest the projected departure of France from her rebelling colony, they were followed by a pitiful number of the military, and the coup petered out within three days. Six decades later, the Lettre des généraux was received with contempt, with most commentators calling its authors “irrelevant”, reading its apocalyptic predictions as a “threat” against the Republic.

Yet this week Olivier Véran, the cabinet spokesman, seemed to share those conclusions as, on a visit to the village of Crépol, south of Lyon, he warned that France might be at a “tipping point” after the fatal stabbing of a local 16 year-old boy. Condemning both the knife attacks during a Saturday evening dance and the subsequent march by right-wing activists intent on a fight into the neighbourhood where the suspects live, the minister vowed that the government would stand with the bereaved family and called for a harsh sentencing, “up to a life sentence [with] no mitigating circumstances”, for the culprits. He reportedly added that the government is “clearly” aware that violence from “packs” is ratcheting up “tensions... you can’t stand these gangs any more... neither can we”, promising the “full mobilisation” of the state to “guarantee the safety of all citizens”.


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