Engulfed in a raging inferno, the bell tower of the 19th-century city hall in Limoges in central France collapsed on Saturday. It was the most visible sign of widespread violence that took place alongside peaceful demonstrations by more than half a million people.
A monument of the past succumbing to the anger of the present is emblematic of the times we’re in. But it doesn’t answer the key question: what comes next?
The wave of frustration in France, which has echoes elsewhere, was set off by high school students in Paris’s poor suburbs in mid-September shortly after the start of terms. They were angry at crumbling classrooms and missing teachers — a sign of structural inequality but also deeper anxiety over the future.
The movement subsequently widened to cost-of-living issues and expanded to unions and protesters from the 2018 Yellow Vest movement, broadening demands beyond getting the system to work as it’s supposed to.
“This is not a problem of short-term solutions,” Gökçe Tuncel, a researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, told France 24. “This is a structural problem that they are denouncing, and their demands are structural changes.”
The response has underscored the polarization of contemporary politics. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen blamed the party of presidential rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far left for the violence and accused Emmanuel Macron’s government of lacking authority.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu underscored the divide with instigators on the far left, saying it’s “time to choose sides,” adding: “Either you are in the camp of the Republic, and therefore of law enforcement — and of those who protect people and property and enforce the laws — or you are on the side of the rioters.”
Hard-left leader Mélenchon later pushed back, saying the people in the government who were unable to ensure public order and the right to protest are “the real culprits.”
With presidential elections looming in April to replace the deeply unpopular Macron (who can’t run again), there’s a political context to the protests and the accompanying violence, which adds to the stakes for protesters and the political establishment.
The unrest in France, though, isn’t isolated. There are similarities in the anger that toppled Nepal’s government, ousted Madagascar’s president and fueled India’s “cockroach” movement. In Spain, after the government lost a housing vote amid mass protests, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called snap elections.
While immediate triggers and subsequent demands vary, the common thread can be traced to a global system that’s struggling to meet the needs of the people. That’s not just material issues like functioning schools and affordable prices, but also a sense of powerlessness.
Underscoring the links between these disparate movements, protesters have regularly displayed a Jolly Roger pirate flag with a straw hat. The emblem is from One Piece, a manga and anime series about a group of misfits fighting a repressive world regime. The people who carry the symbol seem to be signaling that the villain here is the elites that determine who gets what.
The flag has also reportedly appeared in Albania. There, long-running protests have turned violent recently over an array of issues including allegations of corruption and Prime Minister Edi Rama’s support for developing protected coastal areas into luxury retreats backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
These movements have been very good at tapping into frustration and mobilizing people quickly. In Morocco, GenZ212 launched on Discord in mid-September last year. Days later street protests were already taking place under its banner.
But after channeling that energy, the follow-through has been uneven. This is where the movements have shown themselves to be vulnerable.
In Madagascar, protests in which at least 22 people were killed helped bring down President Andry Rajoelina, but then activists were frozen out of the political transition when the military took power last October. A year later, political renewal has yet to take shape. In Morocco, the movement similarly faded from the streets after initial budgetary concessions.
In India, the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party has managed to sustain momentum and carry out near-daily protests, despite crackdowns after forcing the education minister to resign in July. That’s in part because, after its success, it set about building a national organization, though analysts say the gap between a committee and a functioning structure remains.
The best-case scenario might have occurred in Nepal, where former rapper Balendra Shah became the youngest elected prime minister in the country’s history in March. That’s a real mandate for his Rastriya Swatantra Party — which was founded in 2022, a few years before the uprising — but whether the change fulfills the goals of the protesters remains to be seen.
The features that made certain movements fast also made them brittle. Morocco’s GenZ212 went live with a speed that no coalition of organizations could have matched. But that came at the expense of capacity, a tradeoff that exposes such networked movements to “tactical freeze,” or the inability to respond to changing conditions, according to Zeynep Tufekci’s 2017 book Twitter and Tear Gas.
The lesson is that channeling anger only goes so far. Articulating demands and organizing to achieve those goals are harder and require structure: a council, an assembly, or a cooperative network.
Elinor Ostrom offers a useful framework here. She documented how communities manage resources without a single boss, and that’s a very similar problem to the challenges that protest movements face. Her design principles (which I wrote about here) could serve as a guide.
In short, the answer isn’t for activists to establish hierarchies that mimic the institutions they’re rejecting, but to create structures that can channel and maintain public engagement.
The lesson is that channeling anger only goes so far.
That could take on forms like giving citizens a real role in local administrative spending. There could also be demands for assemblies that participate substantively in systemic reforms. That sort of form would go beyond beyond France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was set up in 2019 in response to the Yellow Vests and then had most of its proposals diluted or discarded.
In France’s unrest, the events are still unfolding but the field has already shifted. Lecornu has vowed a “massive” security presence at protests planned for this Saturday, while the looming change in power adds to urgency for all sides.
To be sure, there won’t be all-or-nothing or one-size-fits-all solutions to public outrage, but giving people something to work on and work with is ultimately what building from the ground up is all about.