“Our own ostriches wanted a world without borders and identity, and they have brought us to the brink of civil war,” said the former head of the French intelligence service DGSE, Pierre Brochand, two years ago. What is happening these days is yet another confirmation, but a new leap forward has been made with the attacks on the prisons.

It all began on the night between Sunday 13 and Monday 14 April.

In Agen, seven cars were set on fire in the car park of the National Prison School, forcing the evacuation of 1,000 cadets. Shortly afterwards, a prison officer’s vehicle caught fire several hundred kilometres away, at Réau in the Seine-et-Marne department. It wasn’t until the following night that what appeared to be a plan of coordinated attacks, all targeting buildings and vehicles associated with the prisons, was discovered.

Vehicles were torched in the south, in Valence (Drôme), Nîmes (Gard) and Aix-Luynes (Bouches du Rhône), where a surveillance camera filmed a group shooting at the prison facade, but also in the Paris region, in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) and Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis). In Toulon (Var), the prison door was pierced by shots from automatic rifles (type AK 47). And in Tarascon prison (Bouches du Rhône), fires later broke out in a staff car park, which was fenced off and access to which was protected by a digital code.

Subsequently, several attacks occurred during the night between Monday 21 and Tuesday 22 April. In Le Mouy, a small town south of Beauvais (Oise), a prison van was vandalised. In Caen, four prison vehicles were set on fire and destroyed. In other departments, drones have been spotted near prisons in Lutterbach (Haut-Rhin), Lannemezan (Haute-Pyrénées) and Saint-Quentin-Fallavier (Isère).

The government is talking about terrorism, and Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau announces that there have been «65 attacks» in the last ten days. The anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office has taken over the investigation. France is beginning to resemble the Mexico of drug traffickers.

Meanwhile, at a high school in Nantes on Thursday, a girl was stabbed to death by another student, who was obsessed with “ecocide”.

A few days ago, a man was tortured and had a finger on his hand and a toe amputated. According to a study by the National Crime Observatory, 44,000 stabbing victims have been recorded in two years.

What’s going on in the land of the Enlightenment?

In Montrabé, a town east of Toulouse, a McDonald’s restaurant under construction was set on fire two days ago, «in support of the Palestinian people».

Also synagogues and churches are burning.

Wearing a Star of David around your neck is enough to end up in hospital.

Since 2012, 86 assassinations have been thwarted in France. And 10,500 people have been registered as potential terrorists.

France is witnessing the return of feudalism. It is characterised by local warlords with human, material and military resources at their disposal that guarantee them dominion over a territory, and even the ability to storm prisons. Three years ago, I called it «the multicultural volcano».

The truth, as usual, has been told by Michel Houellebecq, here to the Financial Times:

«We are witnessing a disintegration. It is a catastrophe. The desire of the native French population is not for the Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them, or – another solution – for them to leave. Until recently, all immigrants to France came from the same two regions, North and West Africa. Now they come from all sorts of places: Pakistan, Chechnya, Somalia and other countries. They bring their conflicts here … There are ethnic wars in France over control of the drug trade. Some end in machine gun fire.”

No-one seems to realise it, but in France there are shootings and fires at police stations every single week: in Cannes, in Cavaillon, in Havre, in Nimes, in Roubaix…

Policeman Noam Anouar has published a book about the forbidden zones of France. «The gangs that operate there», he observes, «have created a parallel economy based on drug trafficking. They consider themselves to be at war with France and Western civilisation. They collaborate with Islamist organisations and define assaults and looting as attacks on infidels. Anouar concluded that recapturing these territories today would be complicated and expensive, and would involve the army.

“Flood is the most appropriate term,” said the Prime Minister, the centrist politician François Bayrou, recently.”For a whole country, a whole community of French departments, is facing waves of immigration reaching 25 per cent of the population. It’s not the words that are shocking, it’s the reality.

In Pau, King Henry’s city at the foot of the Pyrenees, a police station, a secondary school and a media centre have burned down.

In Fresnes, attempts have been made to attack the prison to help inmates escape. The prison is known for a high number of Islamists. A witness said: “It’s unbelievable what’s happening, the inmates are excited, it’s unbelievable.”

It doesn’t cost much to get your hands on one of the thousands of “kalashas” in circulation in France. The drug dealers know it, the Islamists know it. And the leaders of the drug trade have names like Mohamed Amra, Abdel Karim T. and Mahdi Z.

How many suburbs are ready for battle? There, weapons circulate freely. Kalashnikovs, Magnum rifles, grenades, hunting rifles. They’re there, hidden in basements inaccessible to the police.

Here’s an attack on a police station.

Officially, the DGSE has mapped 150 «no-go zones» in France, even the security service’s former second-in-command Alain Chouet admits that:

«There are 1,514 neighbourhoods where the police, emergency services, medical and social services have no access, located in 859 cities with a total of 4 million people, that’s 6 percent of the entire population.

As Eric Delbecque, former director of the Institut national des hautes études de la sécurité et de la justice (INHESJ) and head of security at Charlie Hebdo, explains to L’Express, the situation is such that

«the state hasn’t even put itself in a position to take back control of these neighbourhoods, and once you start, it can take up to ten years.»

It’s just that we don’t have another ten years.

Before the 2022 Champions League final at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, football star Thierry Henry (father from Guadeloupe, mother from Martinique, not a white supremacist) shocked public opinion by saying that “Saint-Denis is not Paris”, adding: “Believe me, you don’t want to be in Saint-Denis”.

Here’s what just happened to police in Saint-Denis. Police cars were attacked by gangs in the neighbourhood, and the officers were forced to flee while being pursued with sticks and rods. A no-go zone on the outskirts of Paris. And then you wonder how it’s possible that Marine Le Pen is leading in the polls.

In a significant part of France that political scientist Fabrice Balanche has renamed the mini Etats Islamiques, radical Islam and organised crime have intermingled. The former finances itself with the latter, and the latter supplies labour to the former. And the police have no access. The punishment is ambushes, shootings or urban riots.

This is what a list of GPs looks like somewhere in the French department of Oise.

But the most important thing is to prevent Renaud Camus from speaking in London.

The Wall Street Journal writes:

«Renaud Camus may be the most important living thinker no one has ever heard of. He is certainly the most misunderstood. Western European governments expected mass immigration to boost their economies. Instead, it has led to welfare dependency, crime, terrorism and a sectarian power struggle that has forever changed life in Europe. The only conspiracy Camus sees in the European tragedy is a conspiracy of silence around what he called “the catastrophe”: the mass immigration of Muslims, Arabs and Africans, with negative social consequences that no one wants to admit, much less address. A struggle is visible in the public sphere in Europe, where mass Muslim prayer in the streets is undermining a fundamental liberal principle: the distinction between private faith and the public sphere. This year, London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan lit up the city for Ramadan. At the same time, attacks on Jews, synagogues and Jewish schools have reached record levels. In practice, diversity leads to radical changes that override the values of the democratic majority.

This is Nimes, where a ten-year-old boy has been killed.

If they had shown us the same streets ten years ago, would we recognise them today?

Nearly two years ago, we saw the prelude to the «civil war» in France: 5,000 cars and 1,000 buildings burned, including 200 schools. There were 250 attacks on police stations, 700 police officers were injured, and one firefighter was killed. Boualem Sansal was already envisioning «the next big explosion».

Police and firefighters called to respond to fires in these neighbourhoods have been told to «let them burn» to avoid ambushes, reports crime and justice reporter William Molinié. “In the inner suburbs and in Paris, police officers escorting firefighters putting out fires are now being asked to let the fire burn until there is no longer any danger of it spreading, so as not to expose themselves to the risk of an ambush,” he writes.

That’s how far France has sunk.

Two French police unions – together representing 90 per cent of the police force – have issued a dramatic warning to the political class. They say they can no longer endure the dictates of these violent minorities and that “we are at war”.

In a letter published in the weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles, 2,000 French soldiers write:

«If a civil war breaks out, the military will maintain order on the ground, because they will be called upon to do so. Nobody could wish for such a terrible situation, but there is a civil war in France and you know that very well. Take action, ladies and gentlemen. This time, it’s not about ready-made phrases or media coverage. It’s about the survival of our country, about the survival of your country.

Here’s another plea from generals and officers in the Journal du Dimanche:

«We have been declared a hybrid and multifaceted war, which at best will end in a civil war, and at worst in a defeat without a future.

Lettres béninoises is the title of a book by Nicholas Baverez, who was an assistant to the great liberal philosopher Raymond Aron. The year is 2040. France is a divided country. The new director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a man from Benin, arrives in Paris. He writes a series of letters to his relatives describing what he sees.

Paris on Sunday is a dead city; everything is closed. This, in addition to the security problems, explains why the tourists have fled. Access to Notre-Dame Cathedral has been an obstacle course since a car bomb attack blew up the Bernardine College near the Ile de la Cité. The mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris was magnificent, but a quarter of the faithful in attendance were police officers. If it is true that the worst war is the civil war, then the worst civil war is the religious war. To ensure the safety of tourists, New Paris has been created alongside Disneyland, reproducing to scale the main monuments of the capital and its most emblematic streets, from Mouffetard to Montorgueil via Boulevard Haussmann. It is apparently possible to hire a replica of the Basilica of Saint Denis, where the kings of France were buried, to organise concerts, conferences or weddings. La Défense, where the tower is no longer maintained because security problems make it impossible to enter, is becoming a free zone outside the law. The president lives locked up in the Elysée Palace …

Fantasy literature?

Not according to former Paris police chief Didier Lallement, who has warned that France is heading for such a «breakdown» that one day troops will be needed to garrison the Elysée Palace. Lallement describes a «devoured» country, where

“Every second crime is committed by a foreigner, who is often in the country illegally” All my experience leads me to predict a dark, very dark future for our children and grandchildren. The social upheavals will be intense and devastating … One day it will be necessary to gather troops in front of the Elysée Palace».

In the meantime, the country has split into three: There is “triple A France”, which consists of the metropolises, the bourgeois suburbs and the tourist areas; “shadow France”, i.e. the crisis-stricken industrial areas, the countryside, the dilapidated small towns without tourist attractions and the urban peripheries with low property prices; and the third France: the Islamised banlieues. The weekly magazine Le Point reports that non-European immigration is also overwhelming shadowy France in the name of “banlieu-isation”.

This tripartite division can now be extended to all European countries, including Italy. A book by three Hungarian journalists tells of the enclaves that are forming across Europe.

Western power elites have had not just days, weeks or months to change course, but at least two generations to avert the multicultural catastrophe (40 years, according to anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler). But the few who have tried to sound the alarm have been ignored, ridiculed or silenced.

They should listen to the world’s bravest woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who just gave this speech in Texas:

«I would advise legislators to come and take a look at the UK, Germany and Sweden to see what has happened to these neighbourhoods. In 1992, when I was there, it was a different world. It was a completely different planet. And now you see some of these videos. Is it Manchester and Birmingham, or Lahore and Cairo or some kind of slum? And this is happening. So in America, because we have a big ocean between us and the rest of the world, we take some things for granted, and we shouldn’t wait until we get to where Europe is, and some of these countries are on the brink of civil war. And maybe when we see what they’re doing, that they have hate laws everywhere. Let’s stop that. Let’s establish freedom of speech. So that people can openly discuss what’s happening in their neighbourhoods and what’s happening in the schools and what they’re teaching the young people. Fight for what we have.

A Blade Runner scenario I now consider more than realistic: “ethnified” neighbourhoods in thousands of European cities where the rules are dictated by parallel governments. Jews haven’t just started leaving the country in their thousands every year; they’re also moving internally at an impressive rate in search of safer places.

Those who still believe in a change of course can hope. Those who believe the price is too high should pull out of existing and future no-go zones while there’s still time.

Originally published on the author’s Substack on 24 April 2025.