France protests, media framing, and who gains from the violence

I saw the mainstream coverage of the French protests, and as a Frenchman, I want to give you my perspective from the ground.

I see it, that when looking at France from the outside (or even from outside the protest movement) the picture seems simple. Everyone’s screen shows burning trash, smashed windows, angry rioters, and maybe a brief clip of a police baton. The protesters look like a purely destructive force, while police violence gets a minor footnote.

This framing is a deliberate media trap that serves the ruling power. By painting citizens in the street as rioters and “the enemy,” the state makes it easy to blame them for the chaos. It is a classic distraction. It keeps public attention off the dire condition the ruling class has pushed France into: leading a reckless, ideology-driven foreign policy abroad while leaving domestic politics on autopilot, defunding public services, all that while de-platforming and even persecuting dissenting voices which narrows the perspectives space substantially and ultimately erodes the democratic process (whatever little of it is left in any case).

This is textbook Manufacturing Consent, as Noam Chomsky described it. Western states use media framing to manipulate public opinion and drive dissident voices out of the information space. You are already well aware of how France and the EU use these tactics in foreign policy. Look at the Russia stance: instead of countering foreign media with arguments, the state banned outlets by law and cut off access. Now realize that the exact same manipulation is being used on you regarding France’s domestic protests. You are on the receiving end of the propaganda.

The violence exists, nobody denies the broken glass. But the media uses that violence as a tool to distract public opinion rather than to represent reality or to move in any way the current situation further to improvement.

Left-wing observers usually view this through an anti-capitalist lens: street anger is a reaction to systemic state violence against the most vulnerable. The government constantly cuts social support, squeezes the middle class with heavy taxation, and diverts public funds to serve private capital.

Yet you do not need to subscribe to left-wing theory to recognize a rather obvious fact: the violence does not start with the protesters.

First, look at who benefits. When protests challenge state power, street chaos hands the government a convenient tool to distract and manipulate the public. In France, as elsewhere, police are proven to infiltrate activist groups not only to gather intelligence, but to start violence when a peaceful crowd gives them no excuse to crack down.

Second, the police routinely strike first. In nearly every protest since the gilets jeunes, the French police have heavily used tear gas and munitions on crowds pre-emptively, long before any sign of protester violence. The examples are countless. Recently, police have gassed a metro station with the exits barred, or locked peaceful protesters between cordons (“kettling”) to gas them heavily with no way out, use dispersement munitions (aka rubber grenades) to create additional chaos when they control the situation already. All this is maddening protesters, it does not lead them to start breaking things directly but beating back at heavily armed police is not an option to vent boiling emotions in the peak of the charge either… you see where this is going.

External observers easily condemn violent protesters from a safe distance. Yet put those same virtuous critics in our position. Imagine being marginalized by a state that spends money it does not have on foreign wars against the interests of its own working and middle classes. Imagine watching your democracy erode under a growing surveillance state and state-blessed disinformation designed to keep you compliant. If, on top of all that, you go to the street and get beaten, gassed, and herded worse than cattle by a police force pretending to protect you, even the most virtuous observer would likely snap and join the exact forms of resistance we see today.