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https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/03/when-did-the-left-become-pro-riot/

Apologists claim that the rioters are consciously attacking ‘economic targets’, emblems of the capitalist order, as they ransack everything from Nike stores to Lidl supermarkets. In truth, they are mainly setting fire to their own communities. While there have been clashes with police on Paris’s famous Champs-Élysées, the vast majority of the trouble has been concentrated in some of France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Rioters themselves have admitted to having no political aims. ‘I made a huge mistake… I was caught up in the euphoria’, one typical rioter told a judge last week. Besides, the average age of those arrested is just 17 years old, some have been as young as 13. It is absurd to call this a conscious, radical campaign.

All this talk of ‘rioting for justice’ recalls those other large-scale riots in 2005. That unrest was initially sparked when two teenagers were electrocuted to death as they tried to hide from the police in an electrical substation. Three weeks of rioting followed and three civilians were killed in the chaos. ‘Like today, [the rioters of 2005] were not advancing any political project’, says philosopher Pascal Bruckner. While naive observers saw a ‘proletarian revolution’, one rioter memorably said his demand was for ‘money and girls’.