BREAKING: Macron declares war on rioters so he can immediately surrender to them 5 minutes later
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron declared war Sunday on the rioters burning and blockading its lycées, then surrendered to them before the communiqué had finished printing.
The declaration, issued from the Élysée at 8:14 p.m., described the siege of secondary schools — bins alight, staff injured, two dozen buildings burned or ransacked, several thousand arrested since the start of the week — as “an armed attack on the Republic, conducted partly during third period.” At 8:19 p.m. the same office announced that the Republic had accepted the attackers’ terms, which had not yet been offered. A spokesman called the interval “a full prosecution of the conflict.”
President Emmanuel Macron said the decision honored both France’s ancient martial tradition and its more recent tradition in surrendering. “We do not run from a fight,” he said. “We schedule it, arrive early, and hand over the keys shortly thereafter.” The keys in question were to a high school already on fire. Officials said this saved the trouble of unlocking it.
The unrest began in the Paris suburbs and spread to Marseille, Lyon, Lille and beyond, with pupils blockading the same institutions they say cannot educate them. Education officials counted hundreds of schools closed or disrupted and 78 staff injured. The Interior Ministry counted nearly 5,000 arrests. The Élysée counted one war, lasting five minutes, with no French military casualties and a ceasefire already in effect. Units still outside the lycées were advised that batons were again “contextually inappropriate,” particularly when the opposing force is of school age and the state has just capitulated.
Opposition deputies called the sequence cowardly. The government called it efficient. “Other nations drag these things out for years,” a minister said. “We have compressed declaration, resistance, and capitulation into a single news cycle. The students, meanwhile, have compressed the school day.”
By morning the rioters had not formally accepted the surrender, on the ground that they had not known they were an army. The Élysée said recognition was unnecessary. Reconstruction will be discussed once the remaining fuel is gone, and once anyone can agree whether the grievance is the missing teachers or the country that hired them. Macron is expected to address the nation from a balcony. The nearest open school is not.
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