How does France riot so much without collapsing?

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This is the script for my video posted on October 19, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

France protests more often, and more disruptively, than almost any other wealthy democracy, with strike days per worker in its private sector alone running about five times Germany’s rate. But while French cabinets come and go, all those riots and fires have never brought down the Fifth Republic itself. So why does France have so many protests, and why are they seemingly not a threat to the country’s overall stability?

In some ways, we can trace back France’s preoccupation with protests to the French Revolution, particularly the storming of the Bastille and the premise of popular sovereignty.

The 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for example, declared that when the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. The 1793 constitution was never applied, but this is how the idea of a legitimate insurrection entered France’s political imagination.

Since 1789 there have been five republics, two empires, a short-lived constitutional monarchy, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the collaborationist regime that governed from Vichy during WWII. That’s roughly 15 different constitutions.

After France was liberated, the Fourth Republic that followed in 1946 faced severe political fragmentation. Governments often collapsed just months after forming due to weak executives and unstable coalitions.

The final blow came in May 1958 during the Algerian War of Independence, when French army officers and settlers revolted in Algeria and paratroopers seized Corsica, threatening a civil war in mainland France.

France was paralyzed, and in response its president turned to famous WWII General Charles de Gaulle for help. De Gaulle agreed to return only on his own terms. Parliament granted him extraordinary governing powers for six months, along with a mandate to draft a new constitution, which voters approved by referendum that September.

The resulting French Fifth Republic revolved around a strong executive presidency, a parliament with diminished authority that makes it harder for lawmakers to topple the cabinet, and special presidential powers to dissolve the National Assembly, call referendums, and invoke emergency powers.

The trouble is that in addition to a centralized, top-down state and a deliberately weakened parliament, France has long sidelined intermediary bodies like labor unions, local governments, and civil organizations. Unions were outright illegal from 1791 until 1884. These groups are widespread today, but they have relatively little leverage over the national government, so people often believe that the best way to be heard is to take to the streets.

However, while only about 10% of French workers belong to a union, 98% are covered by collective agreements. Since unions win benefits for almost everyone, their influence comes from mobilizing people rather than signing up members. And because the right to strike in France belongs to individual workers rather than unions, non-members can walk out right alongside them. When France’s normally rival unions unite, as they did against pension reform in 2023, more than a million people can take to the streets in a single day.

Contrary to popular belief, France has a lot of large marches that never devolve into violence, and most of the roughly 550k people the Interior Ministry counted on 17 October marched peacefully. But radical groups often join these demonstrations with the explicit goal of destroying and looting property, angry participants sometimes join in, and French riot-control tactics, which the Council of Europe and UN experts have criticized, can provoke escalation.

Not all unrest starts as a march, though. The 2005 and 2023 riots in France’s suburbs both erupted after teenagers died in encounters with police. Many protests are also a sort of cultural and social ritual, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. Street pressure forced the government to drop pension cuts in 1995, a youth labor contract in 2006, and a fuel tax hike during the Gilets Jaunes movement in 2018. It also helped push the government to suspend the 2023 pension reform in 2025.

The centralized presidency that provokes a lot of frustration is also arguably the reason riots rarely threaten to overthrow the Republic. In France, the government is the prime minister’s cabinet, and it’s essentially expendable. The president can replace the prime minister or dissolve the National Assembly, with emergency powers held in reserve.

So even when the political environment is collapsing, the Fifth Republic itself is not at risk. The prime minister takes the fall so the system doesn’t have to, and since December 2024, three governments have fallen while the Fifth Republic carried on.

Beyond this, the French military has stayed firmly under civilian control since the failed generals’ putsch of 1961. The police and security forces that handle unrest have never defected to protesters, which is a key factor in whether uprisings succeed. And because the public widely benefits from one of the world’s most generous welfare states, most protesters are fighting to defend the social model, not to overthrow it.

That said, France is growing more socially volatile and institutionally paralyzed than it has been in decades. The parliament has been deeply fractured since President Macron’s 2024 snap election backfired. The public is increasingly angry about deteriorating public services and the rising cost of living. And the country faces a fiscal crisis now that public debt has hit a record 119% of GDP. Investors are also demanding high premiums to hold French bonds instead of safer German ones, the highest since the eurozone crisis hit its peak in 2011.

The French state is effectively trapped. It already has one of the highest tax burdens in the developed world and the second-highest public spending in the EU. It can’t cut spending without triggering mass civil unrest, and many economists warn that raising taxes further would choke growth, although the left insists the ultra-wealthy could pay more. Combined with soaring fuel prices and other social pressures, this creates an environment that’s ripe for violence.

And all of this is happening while France tries to serve as a global leader. Macron has been coordinating the G7’s response to fuel shortages caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran, as well as messaging on nuclear deterrence, and supporting Ukraine. But France’s EU partners are now openly pressing it to fix its finances, and the head of the European Central Bank has made clear that the solution has to come from France itself.

Russia has a documented record of exploiting these divisions. French authorities have exposed several Russian disinformation networks that push divisive narratives on both the left and the right.

Marine Le Pen’s party took out a loan from a Russian bank in 2014. Russian outlets are now amplifying fake videos of the protests, though French officials have not accused Russia of actually organizing them. The 2027 presidential election, for which Le Pen currently leads the polls, threatens to upend France’s geopolitical positions, and mass mobilization will play a pivotal role. In the past the government could pay its way out of mass protests, but it now has far less fiscal room to do so, and protesters are disaffected to the point that even that might not work anyway.

The fact is, France faces massive protests partly by design. But while they’ve toppled prime ministers rather than the Republic up to this point, there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.

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