The spectacle was predictable. Hordes of young men, their faces half-hidden by hoods and scarves, clashing with riot police in the shadow of a Champions League match. Hundreds arrested in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. A familiar scene from the pages of history: bread and circuses turning into bread and blood. France, the nation of Voltaire and the Revolution, now a theatre of low-level insurrection masked as football hooliganism. And who steps in to offer advice? The British. Yes, the very people who gave us the Millwall brick and the Heysel disaster are now exporting ‘security expertise’ to the continent. One almost laughs.
But let us not indulge in cheap schadenfreude. The riots are not merely about football. They are a symptom of something deeper, a societal decay that has been setting in since the end of the Cold War. France, like much of Western Europe, has become a cliché of itself: a museum of past glories, staffed by bureaucrats and animated by consumerism. The youth, raised on a diet of social media and educational mediocrity, have no sense of national purpose. Their identities are fractured: some claim Islam, others the street, others the empty symbols of republican universalism. The Champions League, that corporate monstrosity of Uefa, becomes the only arena where collective emotion can be expressed. And when that emotion is frustrated, when the police are seen as the unwelcome arm of a state that has failed to integrate or inspire, the result is the riot.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when football was a vehicle for discipline, for the muscular Christianity that built empires. The working classes played by rules, and they respected the police as symbols of order. Today, the police are often seen as an occupying force, especially in the banlieues. The state has lost its moral authority. And the British, who have their own problems with knife crime and gang culture, are now offering ‘expertise’ that consists of little more than surveillance and containment. It is the triumph of technocracy over culture.
The historical parallels are unavoidable. The late Roman Empire saw a similar phenomenon: the urban mobs, fed on free grain and spectacles, became uncontrollable. Riots in the Hippodrome of Constantinople would leave thousands dead. The response was more police, more soldiers, more walls. The rot had set in too deep. France today is not the Roman Empire, but the symptoms are there: a hollowed-out middle class, a disaffected underclass, and an elite that speaks in the platitudes of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ while building gated communities.
What is to be done? The police can only contain, not cure. The rot must be addressed at the cultural level. We need a revival of national identity that is not based on race or religion but on shared history, literature, and values. We need a return to intellectual seriousness, where young people are taught to argue with precision and to doubt their own slogans. We need to stop pretending that football is anything more than a game, and to invest in the institutions that build character: the family, the school, the church. Without these, the riots will continue. The Champions League will go on, but the circus will be ever more bloody.
Until then, we shall watch the British police advise their French counterparts. Two empires in miniature, swapping notes on how to manage the decline. It is a sad sight. But it is the sight of our age.
