Will France’s mass protests and riots spread across the globe?

France is still cleaning up after demonstrations on Oct. 16 that escalated into three days of rioting and looting, damaging more than 3,000 businesses and resulting in more than 2,500 arrests. The protests, led by students demanding improvements to the education system, resumed this past weekend, but with less arson and property damage, partly due to curfews in some areas.

Japanese media have reported on the unrest largely as a matter of fact, but I have found little analysis of its broader significance or potential impact on France, Europe, the United States and Japan. Although it may be too early to draw conclusions, the events remind me, as someone who lived through the 1960s and 1970s, of the old adage that history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.

Large-scale protests are hardly unusual in France. Since World War II, the French Republic has seen at least four major waves of civil unrest. Analyzing how these past demonstrations compare with today’s crisis may shed some much-needed light on the current political landscape.

The historic May 1968 uprising immediately comes to mind. I was in high school when the monthlong rebellion began. Led initially by university students, the movement quickly swept in the working class, fueling demands for education reform alongside anti-war and anti-American protests. Beneath France’s rapid economic growth, youth frustration had reached a boiling point. The younger generation was fed up with an inflexible university system and Charles de Gaulle’s authoritarian, conservative government.

The May 1968 uprising ran parallel to similar protests that emerged in the United States and Germany before spreading to other European countries and Japan, becoming a global trend in the 1970s. In France, the protests led to wage increases for workers, university reforms and de Gaulle’s resignation. From a broader historical perspective, such movements helped entrench the “liberation” of social and cultural values — including feminism, sexual liberation and individual freedom — from traditional family values and authoritarianism.
Looking back, China was also in the midst of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Incited by Mao Zedong, the Red Guards rallied behind slogans such as “Rebellion is justified.” The Cultural Revolution’s indirect influence on student movements in the West should not be underestimated. But it would be wrong to see it as the source of today’s liberal social values in the West. Mao’s aim was not to promote individual freedom or social liberation, but to exploit youthful revolutionary fervor to consolidate his power and purge political rivals.
The next major wave of unrest came with the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris, which I remember vividly because they occurred shortly after I retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The unrest began among young people, including high school students from immigrant backgrounds, and reflected deep frustration over high unemployment, racial discrimination, social isolation and the French government’s hard-line policies.

Unlike the protest movements of the 1960s, the 2005 riots were not led by ideological groups or labor unions. They were largely spontaneous eruptions of anger rooted in poverty and social exclusion. The unrest exposed the limitations of France’s republican integration model, which emphasizes equal treatment regardless of race or religion but has struggled to overcome the disadvantages faced by immigrant communities. Similar difficulties integrating immigrant populations were becoming apparent elsewhere in Europe, including in the United Kingdom and Germany.

The third major protest movement was the Yellow Vest movement, which began in 2018 in opposition to the Macron government’s planned fuel tax increase. Organized largely through social media, it drew in workers, low-income households and the self-employed, particularly in rural areas, suburbs and small towns where daily life depends on driving. The protests, named after the yellow safety vests French motorists are required to keep in their vehicles, soon broadened into a revolt against the rising cost of living and a political establishment seen as favoring urban elites over ordinary working people.

In 2023, further unrest followed the fatal police shooting of a teenager of Algerian descent. That year also saw major protests against pension reforms, while education policy remained a source of public discontent. Seen in this context, this month’s mass protests did not arise in isolation. They can be understood as part of a longer period of social unrest that has persisted since 2023.

This history raises a broader question: Are these protest movements unique to France or could similar unrest emerge in the United States and Japan, as it did during the 1960s?
Some observers argue that today’s large-scale protest movements across Europe differ fundamentally from those of the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier movements were shaped by ideologies such as Marxism and the New Left and organized largely through student groups and labor unions. Today’s protests, by contrast, are often decentralized, leaderless and amplified by social media. In some cases, grievances over identity and inequality have given way to more diffuse expressions of anger, including opportunistic looting and the destruction of property and consumer goods.

Some might therefore conclude that today’s movements lack the potential for global influence that characterized the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. I am less sanguine. What concerns me most is the possibility that France’s far-right forces will exploit the unrest for political gain.

We should remember that, despite their very different aims, the liberal student movements of the past and today’s anti-establishment movements share one feature: opposition to those who hold political power. Whereas the earlier movements championed social liberation, some of today’s movements channel public discontent into xenophobia and populism.
Could Japan face civil unrest similar to what France is experiencing today? Although Japan has less economic inequality and fewer immigrants than Europe and the United States, these conditions offer no guarantee of immunity. If inequality persists or widens and the foreign-born population grows significantly, similar unrest could emerge in Japan, too. France’s riots and protests should not be dismissed as someone else’s problem.