The scenes from Paris this week were a masterclass in civic disintegration. As the Champions League descended into chaos, the French security apparatus crumbled like a stale baguette. Hooligans ran riot, tear gas stained the boulevards, and the world watched a nation that once gave us the Enlightenment descend into a brute spectacle of ineptitude. Meanwhile, across the Channel, British police tactics—long derided by continental intellectuals as ‘heavy-handed’—were suddenly the subject of fawning praise. The irony is as thick as the smoke over the Stade de France.
Let us not mince words: this was a failure of vision, not just of logistics. French authorities, obsessed with the aesthetics of order rather than its substance, have spent decades centralising power while neglecting the gritty, pragmatic art of crowd control. They have the gendarmerie, they have the CRS, but they lack the institutional memory of a nation that has faced football hooliganism since the 1980s. Britain, by contrast, learned its lessons the hard way, after Heysel and Hillsborough, after the dark days of the 1970s. We built a system based on intelligence, de-escalation, and—dare I say it—a certain British phlegm. The French, with their Cartesian zeal for top-down solutions, bungled the basics.
Consider the details. British police use spotters, CCTV integration, and a tiered response system that separates the drunks from the hardcore thugs. French police, as the rioters proved, rely on static lines of helmets and batons, a Maginot Line of the streets. When the floodgates opened, they had no plan B. The result was a shambles: fans locked in the stadium, children caught in the crush, and a PR disaster that will haunt French authorities for years. Meanwhile, the British model—piloted from the Premier League to the Euros—was held up as a gold standard. This was not a moment for Gallic pride. It was a moment for copying our homework.
But let us not pat ourselves on the back too vigorously. This crisis is a symptom of a deeper rot: the intellectual decadence that has infected European policing. For decades, we have been told that ‘community policing’ and ‘soft power’ are the only legitimate tools. The French believed their own propaganda, thinking that a wave of the tricolour could pacify a mob. They forgot that the state’s first duty is to protect its citizens from violence, not to win the approval of sociologists. British police, for all their faults, understand that order is a prerequisite for liberty. The French are now living in the consequences of their neglect.
And what of the political response? President Macron, ever the neoliberal showman, offered platitudes about ‘unacceptable violence’ while his interior minister pointed fingers at everyone but themselves. This is the same government that has weakened border controls, coddled criminal elements in the banlieues, and treated the police as a budget line item rather than a sacred trust. The riots were not an aberration. They were the logical endpoint of a system that values optics over outcomes.
To my British readers: do not gloat. The same forces that crippled French security are at work here. Our police are underfunded, our intelligence services stretched thin, and our politicians are equally enamoured with the language of ‘social cohesion’ over hard-nosed security. The lesson from Paris is that the liberal state must be willing to wield its coercive power, or it will face the mob. If we forget that, the next riot could be on our own streets. And then we will be the ones apologising, not the French.
