Small Protection

When the police do not come, others do. They do not demand obedience. They demand protection money.

I. Two weekends

On 17 October 2026, protests in France by secondary and vocational school pupils against the shortage of teachers and crumbling schools turned into looting and arson. In Limoges the town hall burned. For that weekend the interior ministry counted 2,025 arson attacks, 1,522 looted shops and 1,144 injured police officers. In shopping districts of Marseille, Bordeaux and Paris, owners and staff were at the mercy of looters for hours before the overstretched police arrived. Paris’s 750 municipal police officers had been instructed to keep away from the demonstrations. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said on the radio: “We undoubtedly failed that weekend.”

A week later the state sent 70,000 police officers onto the streets. Several cities imposed bans on assembly and curfews; in Paris the shop windows were boarded up and several museums closed. The ministry reported 1,314 arrests and 24 cases of looting. So the state can act when it wants to. But the trust lost on one weekend does not return with 70,000 police officers on the next. Whoever once had to defend his shop alone for hours no longer relies on someone coming.

II. Small protection

In “Those Who Cannot Provide Security Cannot Demand Obedience” we described the unspoken contract on which all rule rests: I obey because you protect me. Whoever no longer receives the large protection seeks the small. In France this can now be observed. Shopkeepers are organising to defend themselves, dealers in self-defence weapons report a sudden surge in orders, and the justice minister warns against vigilante justice.

On the morning of 23 October, between the two weekends, a man fired an automatic weapon from a car at passers-by in several towns near Paris. One man died and five people were injured. President Macron spoke of a racist terrorist attack: the victims had been chosen solely because of the colour of their skin or their presumed religion. He called the act “a turning point in the life of our Republic”. The suspect was committed to the police psychiatric unit, and whether the act is connected with the riots is not known. But it shows the second direction in which violence moves when order becomes brittle. It is then no longer aimed at shop windows, but at people regarded as the enemy.

III. Who sells protection

The armed shopkeepers are the first stage. The second are those who sell protection. Small protection has its price, and there is always someone to collect it.

That is how the Sicilian Mafia came into being. The sociologist Diego Gambetta described it as a business that offers private protection where the state does not provide it. In Medellín armed groups still demand a regular levy from shopkeepers and bus drivers, which they call “vacuna”, vaccination. The word says it all: one pays so that nothing happens to one, and what might happen comes from those who collect. In the Russia of the 1990s every business needed a “roof”. In Yugoslavia the career criminal Arkan became a warlord whose irregulars murdered and plundered.

The business is so lucrative because it sustains itself. Whoever sells protection has no interest in the state’s return. He lives off the insecurity he manages, and if need be he creates it himself. The customers pay regularly, they cannot cancel, and they have no judge to complain to. Where several groups sell protection, they fight for customers as other companies fight for markets, only with weapons. That is the preliminary stage of warlords and civil war.

The historian Charles Tilly showed that the European states, too, once began this way: as protection racketeers who eliminated their competitors until only one was left. The modern state is the protection seller that won and allowed itself to be bound by laws. When it withdraws, the story begins again.

In France this story does not have to begin. In Marseille drug gangs have controlled entire neighbourhoods for years. The structures that could exploit a situation like that of 17 October efficiently and profitably already exist. They are not waiting for the state to collapse. It is enough for them that it does not come on one weekend.

IV. The entrepreneurs of fear

Sellers of small protection can be found in politics, too. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accuses the left-wing party La France insoumise of having allied itself with far-left extremists to destabilise France. Jean-Luc Mélenchon calls for power to be seized in a revolutionary way and is trying to gather the far-left milieu and the young people of the suburbs under the Palestinian flag. “One must turn everything into a conflict,” he says. The former finance minister Bruno Le Maire demands emergency legislation.

The one who gains most is the one who does least. Marine Le Pen, as the F.A.Z. puts it, is being handed the role of guardian of order without having to make much effort. More than ten thousand people demonstrated against her party congress in Orléans last weekend, and every picture of it confirms her narrative. In 2024 Macron had said, in effect, that the French had to choose between him and chaos. Today he is seen across all party lines as the author of the chaos himself. In “Are Democracy and Competence Incompatible?” we described this trap: whoever experiences one incompetent government after another ends up voting for the one who promises to put a stop to the changing.

V. The empty budget

The government could not respond even if it wanted to. Debt service is now the largest item in the French budget, ahead of education and defence. In mid-October the government gave way, with four billion euros in subsidised loans for renovating upper secondary schools by 2030 and 500 additional teaching posts. Measured against crumbling schools across the country, that is little, and the budget allows no more. The regions responsible for school buildings have no reserves, while the damage from the riots sets off a new avalanche of costs. The CGT and CFDT unions have called a general strike for 5 November. Prime Minister Lecornu said at a press conference: “We screwed up.”

The young see themselves as the victims of a policy that spares the older generation, who want to retire early. Yet the violence was not their doing. Since September, almost nine out of ten of the thousands taken into police custody were minors. Among the perpetrators of 17 October, according to the justice minister, 70 per cent were adults, and they came from two groups, the far-left milieu and the suburbs. The pupils who have been demonstrating for weeks for teachers and decent schools were drowned out by those who profited from the moment. What this generation wants and why it does not get it we described in “Youth Is Our Future”.

VI. And Germany?

On 31 October young people in Germany, too, are taking to the streets. The youth researcher Mathias Albert does not expect French dimensions, because Germany has no banlieues. That may be true. But the decisive difference between the two countries lies neither with the young nor in the suburbs. It lies in whether the state still delivers: safety on the streets, teachers in the schools, a room in the city where one studies, a police force that comes when called. The ingredients are present here, too: an ageing society, a conflict between generations, dilapidated schools and a capital where the state already fails in everyday life in many places.

VII. The thesis

Whoever does not provide security gets competition. First the citizens arm themselves, then others sell them protection, and in the end the sellers of protection fight one another. After Tito’s death it took Yugoslavia ten years for order to tip over. In France a single weekend was enough to show how thin it has become.

A state does not lose its monopoly on force on the day town halls burn. It loses it on the day the first shopkeeper would rather pay a gang than the tax office.

Further reading: Those Who Cannot Provide Security Cannot Demand Obedience · Are Democracy and Competence Incompatible? · Youth Is Our Future