France Is Having Its Most Violent Autumn in Years. The Rest of Europe Is Not.

A viral video says Europe is falling. The counts say France is having its most violent autumn since at least 2020, and Italy, Belgium and Portugal are having an ordinary one. Crowd sizes here come in two versions, the government’s and the organizers’, and we give both.

What happened, with names and dates

The video that set this off is Andrei Jikh’s “It’s Starting: The Fall of Europe,” posted October 23. It opens on a weekend of chaos: “More than half a million people protested in France,” supermarkets looted, public buildings set on fire, thousands arrested, rioters clearing “one of the most famous squares in Europe” in Milan, and marches in Belgium and Portugal “that same weekend.” A week earlier, it says, “a 400-year-old market in Paris also burned to the ground.”

The video never names a protest or a date. Here is what we found.

The weekend was Saturday, October 17. In France, it was the biggest day yet of a movement that took off on September 17, when students at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil blockaded their school, the day after a teachers’ strike over missing staff, franceinfo reported. A few schools had been blockaded earlier in the month; Créteil is where it caught. From September 21 to October 2, there were more than 5,000 arrests, according to Interior Ministry figures relayed by Amnesty International France, which said 85 percent of those arrested were minors.

The marches grew. On September 29, a public-sector strike day, the ministry counted 206,000 people nationwide. On October 6, it counted 256,000; organizers said 450,000. On October 17, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez put the crowd at about 550,000; organizers said about 800,000. That day, Limoges’s town hall was gutted by fire, Lyon’s tourist office was set alight, and dozens of shops in Marseille were looted, Al Jazeera reported. The ministry’s consolidated count, reported on October 19, was 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured, seven seriously.

So the big claims check out: more than half a million marched (by the government’s count, the lower one), buildings burned, shops were looted, and arrests ran into the thousands. Al Jazeera reported that violent groups “targeted public buildings, luxury boutiques and supermarkets.” One detail does not check out. The market was the Marché des Enfants Rouges in the Marais, dated to 1615. It burned overnight on October 11 to 12, five days before, not a week. As of the reports that day, its cause was unknown, and none of the reports we read ties it to the protests.

Outside France, the weekend was smaller. Milan’s march, called by a group named Italia in Piazza, drew about 5,000 people, mostly very young, Il Giorno reported. It turned violent: police evacuated the Piazza del Duomo, Il Giorno reported, and stores were looted and about 50 people detained, many of them minors, the AP reported. Belgium saw clashes in Brussels and Liège tied to student anger over education costs and registration fees. Portugal’s march in Lisbon was called by the CGTP union over wages, housing and rents, and was not reported as violent.

And it has not stopped. On October 24, the day after the video was posted, France marched again: about 410,000 by the ministry’s count, about 800,000 by the CGT union’s, CBS News reported.

What they want, in writing

The video says “the official story is that this is about underfunded schools,” and that “that narrative just does not make sense.” The record says the schools story is true, and it is the start of the story, not all of it.

The students’ demands were about school. The student unions’ joint call asked people to block schools and universities “against precarity and social and racist selection” and “for decent study conditions.” The Union étudiante called for “the massive hiring of staff” and the end of Parcoursup, the national university admissions platform.

By mid-October the unions had made it about money. The CGT’s statement on October 17 called for raising “wages, pensions and minimum benefits,” restoring France’s wealth tax and taxing “crisis profiteers.” A joint union text demanded the withdrawal of the “Macron-Lecornu” budget and listed the grievance plainly: “Fuel, food, rent, gas, electricity… everything is going up except wages and pensions.” The unions have called a national strike for November 5.

So the trigger was schools. The fuel is the cost of living. And the main demand is in writing: withdraw the budget.

The count

Here is a tool for reading a wave of protest footage. Call it the outside view. Before you judge one stormy autumn, count how many stormy autumns came before it.

Think of the smoke alarm in your kitchen. It goes off every Thanksgiving. The question isn’t whether it’s beeping. It’s whether it’s beeping more than it does every November.

So we counted. ACLED, a nonprofit that logs protests and political violence worldwide from news and local reports, publishes weekly counts for every region of Europe. Its data for these countries starts in 2020. We added up every protest and riot it logged in the weeks starting September 1 through October 10 (the latest week in the file, which runs to October 16), and did the same for each year back to 2020.

In France, the alarm really is louder. Riots are 13 times the previous high for these weeks. About one event in four turned violent this year; in the six autumns before, it was one in 25 at most. The riots were not a Paris story: ACLED logged them in all 13 regions of metropolitan France, and only 66 of the 682 were in the Paris region.

Everywhere else, the alarm is beeping at its usual volume. Italy’s count is lower than last year’s. Belgium and Portugal sit inside their usual range.

The count also shows a shape. France’s riots peaked in the week starting September 26, at 424, then fell to 149 and then 86 in the next two weeks. October 17 and 24 came after the latest week in ACLED’s file, so they are not in this table yet. ACLED updates on Tuesdays, and we will add the new weeks to this story when it does.

France has seen a month like this before. In June 2023, after a police officer shot 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, ACLED logged 496 riot events in France in a month. The next month it logged 52. Big waves in France have tended to burn hot and short. That is the outside view. It is not a promise.

The bill behind it

Why France, and why now? The answer is a number the protesters are not chanting but the budget is built around.

France’s government debt reached €3,595.5 billion at the end of June, 119.0 percent of everything the country produces in a year, INSEE, France’s statistics agency, reported. That is about €52,000 for every person in France, on our arithmetic using INSEE’s population count. In 2025 the government spent €151.6 billion more than it took in, a deficit of 5.1 percent of GDP, about €2,200 per person. The last year France’s government took in more than it spent was 1974, and then only by 0.1 percent of GDP, INSEE’s long-run figures show. On that point, the video is right.

Think of the debt as water in a bathtub and each year’s deficit as the faucet. France has had the faucet on for 51 years. Turning it down slows the rise. It does not drain the tub.

Interest is the part that bites. France’s governments paid €65.7 billion in interest in 2025, up from €41.7 billion in 2018, according to Eurostat. That is about €950 per person. The state’s line for debt interest and cash management in the 2026 budget plan was €58.6 billion. Its school budget, not counting teacher pensions, was €64.5 billion. Interest is not bigger than schools yet. It is close.

The video also says France spends “roughly a third of its whole economy on social programs.” That checks out. By the EU’s standard measure of social protection, which counts pensions, health care, family and unemployment benefits, France spent 34.4 percent of GDP in 2024, the highest in the EU, Eurostat’s figures show. Finland was next at 32.9. The video says pensions alone are “about 14% of GDP, second only to Italy.” That was true in 2023, at 14.6 percent. In 2024 France spent 15.1 percent and slipped to third, behind Italy and Austria.

Lenders now charge France more than Italy. In September, France paid an average of 4.44 percent to borrow for ten years, according to the European Central Bank. Italy paid 4.36. As recently as February 2025, Italy paid about 0.4 points more than France. France first edged above Italy last winter, from December 2025 to February 2026, fell back below it in the spring, and crossed again in August. Germany’s rate rose too, from 3.19 to 3.47 percent between August and September, so part of the move is Europe-wide. France’s rose faster, from 4.00 to 4.44.

The rating agencies are watching the same thing. On October 23, Moody’s kept France at Aa3 with a negative outlook, Reuters reported, and said the rating rests on the assumption that a deficit-cutting budget for 2027 passes and that financing costs and social tensions ease.

That is the knot. To borrow more cheaply, France has to cut its deficit. To cut its deficit, it has to pass a budget that the people in the street are marching to stop.

The case against our reading

The strongest argument that this is bigger than one bad autumn is not in the street. It is in the bond market. The gap between what France and Germany pay to borrow for ten years averaged 84 hundredths of a point in January 2025, fell to 66 in February 2026, this year’s low, and rose to 97 in September, ECB data show. If that gap keeps widening, interest eats more of the budget no matter how quiet the streets get.

A second argument: our count stops at October 10, and the two biggest Saturdays came after it. If October and November run hotter than September, “a short wave” is the wrong description. That is why our call below is about November.

A third: one in four events turning violent is new for a French autumn in ACLED’s data. Only the June 2023 riots, a month of rioting rather than marching, ran higher. The 2023 pension marches, which were huge, stayed mostly peaceful. Something about this wave is different, and it may be who is in it. Most of the people arrested in its first two weeks were minors.

What this means over here

The video says every one of its theories “has parts of them that are already happening here in the US.” On one, the debt, it has a point we will test properly in Part 2. In fiscal year 2026, interest took 14.2 cents of every dollar the US federal government spent, up from 13.8 cents the year before, on our arithmetic from the Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statements. The two countries’ budgets are built differently, so that number is not comparable with France’s figures above. Part 2 lines them up on the same basis.

Our call

We think this wave is past its peak. ACLED will record fewer riot events in France in November than in October. We put it at 80 percent.

Here is why, and how it could go wrong. ACLED counts by week, and we assign each week to the month it starts in. That gives October five weeks, including the week of the November 5 strike, and November four. October already had 235 riot events after its first two weeks, before the marches of October 17 and 24 were even counted. For November to match it, the wave would have to grow. Since 2020, every month with more than 40 riot events in France was followed by a smaller one. The risks are real: France marched again on October 24, the unions want more, and two months after a spike is less predictable than one. If November is hotter than October, the outside view was wrong this time, and we will say so on our scoreboard.

The bottom line

Europe is not falling. France is having a hard autumn of its own: a government with no room left, a budget fight that started in high schools, and lenders who now charge it more than Italy. The smoke alarm is real. It is going off in one kitchen.

Sources

• Andrei Jikh, “It’s Starting: The Fall of Europe,” YouTube, Oct 23, 2026: youtube.com. Quotes from the auto-generated transcript.
• ACLED, Europe and Central Asia aggregated data (weekly, admin1), downloaded Oct 24, 2026, covering weeks through Oct 10, 2026: acleddata.com. Caveat: all counts and comparisons are our sums of ACLED’s weekly file; weeks run Saturday to Friday and are assigned to the month of their start date.
• franceinfo, Oct 1, 2026 (Créteil, Sept 17 start, teachers’ strike): franceinfo.fr
• Amnesty International France, Oct 2, 2026, updated Oct 6 (more than 5,000 arrests Sept 21 to Oct 2, 85% minors, Interior Ministry figures): amnesty.fr. Caveat: an NGO relaying ministry figures.
• Journal de l’Economie, Sept 30, 2026 (Sept 29, 206,000, Interior Ministry): journaldeleconomie.fr
• Euronews (French), Oct 6, 2026 (Oct 6, 256,000 vs 450,000): fr.euronews.com
• Paris Match Belgique / Belga, Oct 18, 2026 (Oct 17, about 550,000 per Nuñez vs about 800,000 per organizers): parismatch.be
• Economie Matin, Oct 19, 2026 (consolidated Interior Ministry count: 2,397 arrests, 997 police and gendarmes injured): economiematin.fr
• Al Jazeera, Oct 17 and 18, 2026 (Limoges, Lyon, Marseille; Belgium; Portugal): aljazeera.com, aljazeera.com
• franceinfo, Oct 12, 2026 (Marché des Enfants Rouges fire, cause unknown): franceinfo.fr; Euronews, Oct 12, 2026 (dated to 1615): euronews.com
• Il Giorno, Oct 17, 2026 (Milan, Italia in Piazza, about 5,000): ilgiorno.it; AP via ABC News, Oct 17, 2026 (about 50 detained): abcnews.com
• CBS News, Oct 24, 2026 (Oct 24, about 410,000 per ministry vs about 800,000 per CGT): cbsnews.com
• Student unions’ appeal, Sept 29, 2026, reproduced by Syndicollectif: syndicollectif.fr; Union étudiante demands, franceinfo, Oct 6, 2026: franceinfo.fr
• CGT statement after Oct 17, reproduced by Syndicollectif, Oct 19, 2026: syndicollectif.fr; intersyndicale text, Imaz Press: imazpress.com; Nov 5 strike call, VousNousIls, Oct 6, 2026: vousnousils.fr. Translations ours.
• INSEE, Informations Rapides no. 239, Sept 29, 2026 (debt €3,595.5 billion, 119.0% of GDP, end Q2 2026): insee.fr
• INSEE, population at Jan 1, 2026, 69,082,000 (provisional): insee.fr. Caveat: per-person figures are our arithmetic.
• INSEE, general government net lending series 1949 to 2025 (1974 last surplus, +0.1% of GDP): insee.fr
• Eurostat, gov_10dd_edpt1 (2025 deficit €151.6 billion, 5.1% of GDP) and gov_10a_main (interest payable D41: €65.7 billion in 2025, €41.7 billion in 2018), updated Oct 21, 2026: ec.europa.eu/eurostat
• Eurostat ESSPROS, spr_exp_type (social protection expenditure, % of GDP: France 34.4 in 2024, highest in the EU) and spr_exp_pens (pensions, % of GDP: France 14.6 in 2023, second; 15.1 in 2024, third): ec.europa.eu/eurostat. Caveat: rankings are ours, among the 27 member states in the file, fetched Oct 25, 2026.
• Assemblée nationale, Projet de loi de finances pour 2026, no. 1906, état B (programme 117 debt charge €58.6 billion): assemblee-nationale.fr; Sénat report on mission Enseignement scolaire (€64.5 billion excluding pensions): senat.fr. Caveat: budget as filed; the enacted 2026 law’s figures were not opened.
• European Central Bank, long-term interest rates for convergence purposes, 10-year government bonds, monthly averages, France, Italy, Germany: data.ecb.europa.eu
• Reuters via Boursorama, Oct 24, 2026 (Moody’s keeps France at Aa3, negative outlook): boursorama.com
• US Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statements for September 2025 and September 2026, via Fiscal Data: fiscaldata.treasury.gov. Caveat: the 14.2% and 13.8% shares are our arithmetic from net interest and total outlays.